Under Review: The Unravelling of Ou by Hollay Ghadery

Told from the perspective of Minoo’s sock puppet, with its shocking yellow pate of curly yarn-hair, The Unravelling of Ou explores a series of misunderstandings, elisions, and hard truths in Minoo’s life—which has been greatly shaped by modes of patriarchal oppression. As a teenager, Minoo becomes pregnant, and is forced by her mother to leave Iran. She moves to Canada to live with her aunt, ostensibly to avoid familial shame; her mother intends to raise Minoo’s son as her own. It’s a rocky process, which Ecology Paul portrays through his role as a kind of sage, a wise philosopher who happens to be perennially perched on Minoo’s hand, in a way no one can ignore. Not everyone walks around with a button-eyed cabin sock on their hand. Believe me, I should know.

My mother was a primary school teacher. When I was a child, she spent hours crafting sock puppets like this one, and used them to connect with her pint-sized students, and with me. Admittedly, these days the puppets languish in shoebox, and are not proudly displayed atop the necks of two-litre pop bottles as they are in Ghadery’s novel. But in The Unravelling of Ou, Minoo’s puppets do not make mother-daughter connections come easily. On the contrary, a lack of connection is a persistent theme.

For example, Roya is aware of her mother’s past, but has been shielded from the full extent of Minoo’s anguish; Roya knows her brother Davood remained in Iran, but has trouble accepting how deeply his absence has wounded her mother.

Ecology Paul is Minoo’s externalized self; the primary way she copes. Roya has threatened to banish the puppet, just as Minoo’s mother banished her from Iran so many decades earlier, and this parallel happenstance proves too much for Minoo to take, on several levels.

As a narrative conceit, Ecology Paul is brilliant; the puppet allows Ghadery to explore the internalization of patriarchal norms, how women can use these to harm other women, from a heart-on-your-sleeve, simultaneously inside/outside point of view: Minoo “remembered the look on her mother’s face when, fresh from a shower, she’d danced around the room in her towel…her face compressed, and her features huddled in disdain” (52). Her mother is both victim and perpetrator, oppressed and oppressor. That liminal state is so very authentic to familial histories of abuse. In this book, the characters are flawed, the coping mechanisms contradictory, and that’s what makes it ring true.

Readers should expect nothing less from Ghadery, a multi-genre writer whose recent titles include the poetry collection Rebellion Box (Radiant Press, 2023); Fuse (Guernica Editions, 2021), a memoir of mixed-race identity and mental illness; as well as Widow Fantasies (Gordon Hill, 2024), which was recently nominated for the 2025 Toronto Book Awards.

The Unravelling of Ou is heartbreaking, richly poetic, but also frequently funny; in one unexpected scene, Minoo is pulled over in her car by a kind, if rather confused, police officer, who ends up having to converse with Ecology Paul, not Minoo, to retrieve Minoo’s license and registration (47).

Minoo might be only muddling through, but there is a constant thread of optimism tugging her along. Early on, she ties herself to her aunt Cala, a maternal figure who, with patience and steady guidance, gives her niece the time and space to discover who she is as she matures. Once married, Minoo’s husband Atanas also tries to support her however he can, albeit imperfectly. At points, I found myself wanting to spend more time with these fascinatingly crucial secondary characters—to know more about how and why Cala emigrated, for example, or to better feel where the deep-seated bitterness and unfeeling indifference of Minoo’s mother originated. But Ecology Paul is not fully omniscient and needn’t be. The puppet is a fly-on-the-wall, with access to Minoo’s thoughts and experiences because they speak with the same voice: “You were there the day I was pieced together from felt and wool and wire. You gave me voice. And when I say you live in me, I am not being metaphorical…the purr of our completeness, it fills me” (7).

Ghadery’s prose does indeed purr. Her language is mellifluous. The way she wields greater metaphors and figurative devices is a reason to read this debut novel all on its own. When Aunt Cala’s antique plates arrive shattered, after being shipped all the way from Iran, she fashions them into a colourful mosaic tabletop, a metaphor for the immigrant experience on the whole: “Minoo ran her fingers over the table’s glossy, uneven surface; it was a soothing sensation, the shattered crags of enameled clay, whole in their fragments” (62). When we’re broken, we can make things new again. In tough times, we do the best with what we have; we should try to understand each other.

And that’s one of the most remarkable things about The Unravelling of Ou. It encourages the reader to see potential in things and people they might otherwise rush to judge. Lay your preconceptions aside, it urges. Keep an open mind. Don’t underestimate the transformative power of some pipe cleaners, two buttons, and a bit of thread. And if you know any sock puppets like I do, maybe find out how they’re doing. If they’re anything like Ecology Paul, I’m sure the inquiry would be much appreciated.

The Unravelling of Ou by Hollay Ghadery

Palimpsest Press, 15 February 2026

200 pages

$21.95