Elizabeth Eslami is a fresh new voice in literature.  Bone Worship is an insightful, entertaining, poignant, funny and altogether interesting book about a family divided between two cultures.  Jasmine’s Mum is a Southern belle and her Dad is an Iranian doctor.  They raised Jasmine and her brother in Arrowhead, a small Southern town.  Jasmine went off to the University of Chicago, her father hoping she would follow in his footsteps by becoming a doctor.  As the book opens Jasmine is returning home not in the bright splendor of graduation parties and congratulations about her promising future in medicine, but instead as a young woman who failed to graduate.  It turns out she wasn’t even studying medicine with Dad’s money.  Jasmine was tackling a double major in zoology and biology, doing quite well too until that last disastrous quarter. While Jasmine is uncertain what the future might hold, her father has no similar doubts.  She is to be married; he will arrange it quite soon. This book is a lovely cornucopia of complicated family life.  Jasmine has to discover that her father really does care deeply for her and like the rest of us is just doing his best.  There are wonderful contradictions, after all her father did not follow tradition, he married a southern girl.  How this all works out in Jasmine’s life is a tour through the fault lines that occur as this family grapples with tradition, the future, and each other.  Jasmine’s search for a cultural identity is heartwarming, funny, and fabulously interesting.   It is territory Elizabeth Eslami knows well, she was raised in a small southern town with an Iranian-American household.  It is our good fortune that this talented author now calls the Northwest home.