How would the novel read without foreshadowing?ħ.

Discuss how it adds to the story and moves the narrative along. Marjan Kamali employs foreshadowing as a plot device in The Stationery Shop. Do their social classes influence their actions? What would be the repercussions if Roya acted as Badri did in her youth?Ħ. Compare Roya’s desire as a young woman to Badri’s. For example, on page 84, when she watches Jahangir and Bahman dance, she is filled with desire. Throughout the course of her courtship in 1953, Roya experiences passion and longing in new, surprising ways.

Have you experienced that simultaneous closeness and clashing with siblings in your life? What do you think it is about the sibling relationship in general and Roya and Zari’s sisterhood in particular that lends itself to such contradictions?'ĥ. But there is a bond between them that is unbreakable. Roya and Zari have very different personalities and ways of looking at life, and the two sisters often argue and clash.

How are they similar or different to the expectations you or the women in your life have experienced?Ĥ. Do those expectations differ from what was expected of American women? What about women today? Research the cultural expectations of young women in Iran and discuss as a group. That much she knew.' Discuss the importance of 'saving face' for Iranian women in the 1950s. But she had no choice but to bear it, to try to navigate within it. On page 56, after discovering Bahman’s mother believes he should marry Shahla, Roya tries to contain her anger: 'This was the societal web of niceties and formalities and expected good female behavior that often suffocated her. On page 3, Roya observes, 'For hadn’t she married a man who was reasonable and, my goodness, unbelievably understanding? Hadn’t she, in the end, not married that boy, the one she met so many decades ago in a small stationery shop in Tehran, but lassoed her life instead to this Massachusetts-born pillar of stability?' How are Bahman and Walter different? How are they similar? What do you think Roya was looking for in each of them? How do her expectations for a relationship change throughout the story?ģ. Discuss the similarities and differences between her life as a married woman in New England and her life as a teenager living in Tehran.Ģ. The first two chapters show us very different stages in Roya’s life.

The stationery shop marjan kamali