I wasn't as enamored by this book as I'd hoped to be. I'm not sure why. It has so many things that I normally would adore in books. It has a good magical realist premise, more realist than magical. It has an earnest but fallible protagonist, Zal, with an incredible back story. It's a great coming of age novel set against the backdrop of the years preceding 9/11. It has a troubled love story where both participants aren't totally sold on the epic-ness of their entanglement. Zal actually has an on...

Lush, sultry, inventive, and sadly overlooked. Nothing out there this spring/summer quite like it.

3.5 starsThis was one of the oddest and most unique books I've read in a long time. Part myth brought to life and part messed up personal lives set against the back drop of something it will take me awhile to process. I'm not sure if I liked this book more or less than I thought I would at the beginning.

Found this book somewhat "out there". Didn't like the fact that the author chose an event of such magnitude to construct her story around. She seemed to have made light of the fact that the event had even happened and at such an horrific rate of death. I might be a bit blind here, but this didn't appeal to me at all really - I've given it one star just to say I've read it. Not my cup of tea.

4/5stars 4.5-5/5stars | Favorite Standalone February 4 2018 Update: I'm still VERY fond of this book and think it's great, but I've simply read so much BETTER of books since this one that it definitely got knocked down a bit. It's not a fave anymore, and I've definitely seen thing this novel did done better other places. So, bringing this one down just a bit. Trigger Warnings: discussion of rape, portrayal of panic attacks, use of vulgar homosexual slurs, eating disorders This was fuckin' fanta

More like 3.5 stars. The book started out strong, but lost me toward the end. The author tries to make a strong tie to 9/11 but it was too overblown and symbolic for me. The main characters, Zal and Asiya, are strange outcasts who find comfort in one another, and I liked that. I believe their relationship, but their circumstances and lives felt too strange and labored. An interesting read, but ultimately not satisfying.

A post-911 novel based on a Persian myth.I really need to ignore the “average rating” number on Goodreads. I like to pick my next read based on many different sorts of my TBR list (currently 214 books). A few days ago, I decided to pick the book with the lowest average rating (3.40) which was The Last Illusion. Needless to say, it was a 5-star book in my opinion. This has happened to me more than once. Apparently, my taste in literature is beyond the norm. 🤓Zal is a character I will never forget...

The Last Illusion may be one of the most frustrating, incomprehensible books I've ever read. The first half is written in an awkward, stilted, and detached writing style that keeps the reader at an unmanageable distance from the characters. This isn't a criticism; I actually enjoyed the mythical style once I thought I had figured out what Khakpour was doing. But suddenly, the second half switched to an overwrought, occasionally-experimental, emotional writing style that mistakenly assumed the re...

*2.5*Ugh. I'm really torn on this book. I really liked it in the beginning. The writing style is different and a little disjointed, but it worked for me. I like the modern spin on old mythology. But then about a third of the way through it just started to drag for me. I still liked the writing but it felt repetitive and I found the characters to be frustrating. Also I don't think the inclusion of 9/11 or the way it was portrayed was particularly well done.

I read this book in two days while at Ucross, an artists' residency in beautiful northeast Wyoming. This was the perfect setting to read this novel because, 1. The author may have written parts of it in the very same studio I was reading/writing in, which felt magical and impossible-possible in a way that echoed the book's magical yet realistic tone and premise. And, 2. Because I had hours to do with what I wanted, and what I wanted was to write for a couple of hours, and then read for a couple

This novel is far more than it's summary. It is a beautiful tangle of myth, love, magic, and illusion giving the reader one wonderful story. Zal begins his life in a cage, after his mother (horrified by his pale skin and hair) treats him like a bird. He is 'rescued' by his sister only to later come into the care of an adoptive American father and so begins the quest of normalcy for our feral little man. His dreaming in bird is inventively creative and Zal's struggle to be 'like the rest of us' i...

Labelling this book as magical realism or fantasy is somewhat misleading. Although the premise seems fantastical, Zal, the protagonist of this book is abandoned by his mother and raised in a cage with other birds having no contact with humans until he is 10, and in real life there have been no feral children raised by birds, this book is otherwise more on the realistic side. However what makes this book mythic is the fact that Zal is named after a character in the Persian Shahnameh, or Book of K...

Zal was raised as a bird, but he isn't really a bird. He is a boy, but only in the physical sense. Trapped in a cage for the first ten years of his life by an abusive mother for having light skin, his siblings were the other caged birds, from whom he learned how to be a bird. When he is eventually released, a team of developmental psychologists and scientists specializing in feral children help him learn normal human ways. From there, he has to master the world like anyone else.Along the way he

Synopsis: At the age of forty-seven, Khanoom gives birth to a baby boy. An unplanned child with a husband who's long dead after a prolonged sickness, the baby's an albino. Khanoom has a fetish for catching birds and putting them in cages, all of whom she considers dear to her, much more than her eight children. Especially her eighth one, the albino, who she refers to as the white demon. She cuts off all human contact and keeps the child like a bird in a cage.On intervention from Khanoom's sev

This is a highly symbolic work about two very damaged people: Zal, a boy whose mentally ill mother profoundly neglected him and raised him among birds, and Asiya, another abandoned child, who suffers from frequent panic attacks and has very specific visions about the 9/11 attacks in New York. Before they happen. Together, Zal and Asiya try to be "normal" young adults, with limited success. I found The Last Illusion to be well-done, even funny in parts, and I could tell the author was accomplishe...

This was nothing like I imagined it to be. Definitely one of the most disappointing reads of the year so far.This book follows a young Iranian boy who has been kept in a birdcage by his mother. At the beginning of the novel he is rescued from his ten-year long prison and taken from Iran to New York where he is adopted by a behavioural analyst. We then see his VERY speedy recovery - some how he manages to reclaim his posture, speech and can function pretty well in human company. The book then det...

Could a boy be a bird? Could a bird be a boy? Could a boy be raised by birds? Or by his own mother, stuck in a cage, with no place to move and no sound to utter and no embrace to receive, hailed as the White Demon? Could a Persian myth be a story played out in New York of 2001? The 2001? That awful September month? That day, the 11th? It could. And it could rivet you to your seat, or to the floor, or to the wall, or wherever it is you would be reading this book, perhaps perched on the edge of yo...

this book is fantastic. i feel i should start from the beginning and read the whole thing again.

So heavy handed and repetitive. This concept was original and started out really well, but took a bad turn. I got so tired of reading about the mundane lives of the lead characters midway through, despite their quirks and insecurities. Even worse was how the author kept alluding to 9/11 in such a cloying and irritating way. She'd say things like"the year after 2010 was 3/4ths complete" or "August had just passed". Those weren't direct quotes, but there are some equally terrible ones throughout t...

From the critically acclaimed authors of "Sons and Other Flammable Objects" comes a bold fabulist novel about a feral boy coming of age in New York, based on the legend from the medieval Persian epic The Shahnameh, the Book of Kings.