House of Yesterday

By: Deeba Zargarpur

Narrated by: Ariana Delawari

Taking inspiration from the author's own Afghan-Uzbek heritage, this contemporary YA debut is a breathtaking journey into the grief that lingers through generations of immigrant families, and what it means to confront the ghosts of your past.

Struggling to deal with the pain of her parents’ impending divorce, fifteen-year-old Sara is facing a world of unknowns and uncertainties. Unfortunately, the one person she could always lean on when things got hard, her beloved Bibi Jan, has become a mere echo of the grandmother she once was. And so Sara retreats into the family business, hoping a summer working on her mom’s latest home renovation project will provide a distraction from her fracturing world.

But the house holds more than plaster and stone. It holds secrets that have her clinging desperately to the memories of her old life. Secrets that only her Bibi Jan could have untangled. Secrets Sara is powerless to ignore as the dark

©2022 Deeba Zargarpur (P)2022 Recorded Books

Fantastical family drama!

This book was really interesting! It was my first experience reading about Afghan-Uzbek culture, and I really enjoyed learning a bit about it!
The family dynamics were very realistic and were the heart of the story.
However, it was a bit hard to keep track of what was real and what wasn’t (or rather what was a vision and what wasn’t?). It *did* give it a bit of a dreamy quality, but at times was confusing. Perhaps this would have been made more clear in a print version of the book versus the audiobook I was listening to?
Regardless, I loved the narrator. She sounded like a teenager, not too old, not too young, and didn’t have that fake quality some narrators have when reading teenage characters.