House of Yesterday is a contemporary YA title that explores intergenerational trauma and identity using the supernatural as a bridge between generations. Drawing from her own Afghan-Uzbek heritage, Zaragarpur crafted Sara, the protagonist, as a teenager from an immigrant family. I was amazed at how “real” Sara felt and how her family’s traditions, language, and values were woven into her identity.

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.

I think this could absoultely be a comfort-read & is an essential viewpoint to showcase within fiction, but I just found the main character to be too insufferable to enjoy the story so much. The audio narration is actually really good, so I was able to listen to the book in its entirety despite my reservations, for which I'm grateful. I'm glad that I read this, but I just can't reccomed it so much, as I found the main narration to be almost headache-inducing.
I personally feel as though this book can be marketed a few ages lower. There isn't really anything majorly beyond subtext that younger readers wouuldn't be able to understand/pick-up on. Sara is the kind of narrator that I feel younger readers would have more of an appreciation for, especially given what she's going through.
Going through your parents' seperation from each other can be a very difficult situation for children/pre-teens to deal with, I've been through it myself. I think I may have had less of an appreciation for Sara's point of view & her various outburts/behaviour due to me having made peace with the situation so long ago, being an adult now, I think that most of her behaviour struck me as entirely innapropriate, I was most often screaming at myself in second-hand embraesssment. I dealt with all of the same feelings that Sara does, & yet the way in which she handles herself during it all threw me off of any sort of feelings of resemblance.
She is also genuinely just a genuinley bad person & bad friend to her only friend in the entire story, & honestly I wouldn't have stuck around for her abuse as long as he ends up doing. I didn't like getting the vibes that he was into her & would forgive any sort of mistreatment in-turn, which, not a great dynamic, given she does generally mistreat him every time they see each other. But honestly, their "chemisty" & interactions in the story were just so boring that I found myself tapping out most often they were having dialogue.
I appreciated the different culture depicted within this book, I'm always a fan of non-European cultures being centered, however I just wasn't all that interested in the story overall for it to make a difference in my enjoyment.

Thank you so much to net galley and the publisher for sending me a copy of this book! I ended up really enjoying it. The family dynamic was interesting to read about!

I found this one a bit of a challenge. The experience, the atmosphere, the approach are all bit foreign. It was difficult for me to engage and understand the character motivations. I felt like I was missing important context.

No lo pude terminar. Se me hacía complicado seguir la línea de la trama por los nombres de los personajes.
Te podías perder fácilmente si no prestabas atención desde un principio.

House of Yesterday by Deeba Zargarpur

Stars 4
Spice 0
Narration 5

Points > Paragraphs
• Ghosts
• inter-generational
• Magical realism
• Contemporary YA
• afghan-uzbek representation
• family secrets
• Trauma
• spooky and sentimental
• coming of age
• YA
• Fantastic narrator
• Divorce
• Dementia

Thank you to RB Media, and NetGalley for the audio ARC of House of Yesterday
by Deeba Zargarpur

Thank you NetGalley for one more wonderful arc!

House of Yesterday, by Deeba Zargarpur is a book about many things, but the element that stood out for me was family and familial ties. The protagonist, Sara, is surrounded by her family and the women of her family for almost the entire narrative, and each and everyone of them sound so different from the other.

The audiobooks narrator did an amazing job differentiating so many feminine characters, in no moment throughout the narrative I had problems trying to differentiate the characters.

I wanted to love this but i didnt connect to the story. The plot was good its just wasnt my type of story but the author did amazing writing it

I listened to the audiobook for House of Yesterday, and for someone like me who hates not understanding names perfectly, it was a very dumb choice. The main character has many aunts and family members, whose names I wanted to get right, so as soon as the book came out I got an ebook so I could check everything and make a family tree. The voice narrator was very good though! I’m just a little psycho.
This was a nice book and I appreciated the uniqueness of it, having never read about an Uzbek-Afghan character before. Overall I really enjoyed it and found myself engrossed in the story during the climax. But there were a few plot points that I’m not sure I fully understood and that confused me a little bit, spoiling part of the experience for me.

This tells the story of Sara, a young girl whose (large) family immigrated from Afghanistan in the 1980s to escape the civil war. She lives with her mother and grandmother, who she’s really close to, but who unfortunately has dementia and has to be taken care of constantly. Her parents are also in the middle of a nasty separation that is really hard on Sara. One day, while working on renovating a house for her mother’s business, she sees a strange vision of a little girl who seems to want to show her something, and she dives into her family’s, and more specifically her grandmother’s history to figure out what it is.
Technically, this book if a fantasy because Sara literally has visions of the past showed to her by a haunted house. But I think it was more of an excuse to explore themes of family and generational trauma, as well as reconciling with your heritage. Like I said, the main character’s parents are also going through a divorce and the book makes it clear that their very toxic marriage is totally normalised in their daughter’s mind. She expects every relationship in her life to follow that pattern, which plays a huge part in her world view and greatly affects her own relationships with everyone around her, and of course the story is also about how she’s going to overcome that and evolve as a person.

This is very much a character-focused novel, so let me tell you a bit more about each of them.

Sara (her full name is Sara Jan, she was named after her Bibi – her grandmother) is a frankly lonely 16 or 17 years old teenager who is clearly angry at everything and everyone, but mostly her parents. She blames them for their separation, and doesn’t understand why they haven’t gotten back together after their latest fight like they usually do (she calls it “their dance”). She shows symptoms of anxiety as well as anger management issues, I think? She’s just very confused and lonely and sad, and feels like her family structure is disintegrating (her parents, but also her Bibi who is losing her memory and doesn’t remember her children and grandchildren most of the time). To be honest, at first I thought she was a brat and I was shocked at how disrespectful she was being to her parents. As a child of divorce myself (a bad one), I wasn’t trying to deny her anger and sadness, but couldn’t help thinking that she was overreacting just a TINY BIT. But after a few flashbacks explaining the nature of their relationship and how this has affected Sara ever since she was a little girl, literally escalating to physical violence, I could understand a bit more where she was coming from. Sara is also distressed by her Bibi’s dementia, because she feels like she’s losing her grandmother and the connexion they used to have was very strong. Through her journey to understanding what happened to her grandmother when she first came to the US, she also learns a lot about herself and her resentment and makes a lot of efforts to learn how to process her feelings in a healthier way than shutting down everyone around her. In the end, even though it’s clear Sara still has a long way to go and isn’t fully over her traumas yet (it’s not mentioned in the book but she should definitely get therapy), you can see that she’s found some sort of inner peace and is on the right path, so overall I’d say she had a pretty good character development.

Sara’s most important family members are of course her parents, who I’ve already talked about a little. I get that they didn’t know how to communicate with their daughter anymore, but they were honestly doing a pretty bad job at trying to fix the mess they created in her because of their own behaviours as a couple. I felt like they were so focused on their own lives and problems that they didn’t really pay attention to Sara and failed to see how terrible she was doing. They were mostly telling her to toughen up and pull herself together – which honestly sounds true to the brown immigrant parents experience. Her mother does acknowledge that at the end and shows signs of trying to do better, but I don’t think I remember seeing it in her father.
Then we have Sara’s Bibi, her dearest grandmother, who is both very present and absent in the story. She’s obviously a key to the family’s secrets Sara is trying to uncover, but her present self is such a shadow of who she used to be that even as a reader, you can feel Sara’s pain in slowly losing her, and understand wanting to honour her memory by telling her story. The scenes where we read about past Bibi though, she was such a fierce and unapologetic person, but also so wistful and powerless in a lot of moments in her life.
Everyone else in Sara’s family – her numerous aunts and cousins – also appear in the story, and they were nice additions. You can really feel the sisterly love between her mother and all her aunts, and I loved how close they all were, it reminded me of my own family. Sara’s cousins who are around her age are all friends which each other and her relationship with them felt really genuine, in the sense that they bickered all the time and would sometimes say hurtful things, but in the end they all had each other’s back and showed up as emotional and physical support when necessary.

The only character I haven’t mentioned yet is the neighbour / ex best-friend / pseudo love interest, which doesn’t sound like me because I love talking about characters like this. But Sam was really a totally separate presence in the story: he’s the only one who isn’t part of Sara’s family and hence affected by her little digging, but he was still there ALL. THE. TIME for our girl. I was pleasantly surprised and impressed to see a teenage male character written this way. He was close to his emotions and expressed them freely, without shame, and Sara was actually the closed off one denying her feelings. No matter how many times she shut him down, he kept insisting and trying to reach out to her. At the beginning, we only know that they used to be very close and then had a falling out during one fateful night.
I actually thought it was very interesting how Sara mimicked her parents’ toxic relationship, playing their “dance” and going back and forth between being together or not, and applied it to her own relationship with Sam. She kept pushing him away and expecting him to always come back and for them to play this game over and over again. But eventually Sam breaks that cycle, and thanks to Sara’s aforementioned character development throughout the book, they manage to sort out their issues and their past. I think their relationship can be read as either platonic or romantic, and since I’m a lover of love I chose the later haha. And even though they don’t end up together at the end, I chose to believe that it was only a matter of time and that they eventually would once Sara had had a bit more time to reflect on everything and work on herself.

I don’t want to spoil the story itself too much, but like I said, I think it was mostly about family and what it means and how we can maintain our bonds even after memories fade. It was nice, albeit a bit predictable, and the pacing was pretty fast so I was never bored.
However, it did have some trouble understanding the way the house itself worked. It basically releases memories trapped inside it for Sara to see and figure out the truth of her family’s heritage. But I wasn’t sure how or when these were triggered, and there was also a consequence to that, because Sara had to give some of her own or her family’s memories in return, which they then FORGOT, as well as physical trinkets (at some points she gives a necklace and then it’s never seen again?). Sara was also able to communicate with the people in the past memories, and have conversations with them, so possibly changing the course of events? and that contradicts every see-the-past power limits I’ve ever read about which was incredibly confusing.
So yeah, as we know I prefer hard magic systems so casual things like these kinda fuck with my brain because I keep trying to understand the rules lmao.

The book ends on a nice and hopeful note, but I was left a bit hungry for more and wish it had a dozen extra pages or so to develop the ending.
TWs: child marriage, domestic violence, death of a child, parental abandonment, anexiety

Such a powerful coming of age story that addresses divorce, family trauma, dementia, and immigration with a supernatural spin.

At first, I thought that this book was a horror book, and this was how it was. The first part of the story would give you an eerie feeling, with a girl who mysteriously appeared in an abandoned house. But then, the more the story got revealed, instead of horror, I felt more emotional, and the narrator truly didn't help it. She was so good in bringing up the feelings of each character. If I didn't listen to the audiobook and just read from the physical one, I thought I wouldn't have such a deep feeling about this book.

This book screams a clear message about memories. No matter how hard you wish for them to come back, they won't. Life must go on, no matter how hard it is, because after all, living for the future is better than living in the past.

A story that takes the author's own experiences and creates a contemporary young adult novel with elements of magical realism and a lush heritage of an  Afghan-Uzbek family.

This is a book that examines relevant emotions surrounding divorce, coming of age and life upheaval for fifteen year old Sara. The beauty lies in the past of her family that exists in the ghosts and memories flitting about an old home renovation project.

The audiobook is narrated by Ariana Delawari with emotion and tone fit for the MC. I really liked the aspects surrounding family, personal growth and the emotional aspects that many kids at that age struggle through in similar situations. I had a slightly difficult time following what occurred in the house with the past. It felt choppy and not fully fleshed out at times.  The ending does a lot to tie in the areas I struggled with and has a beautiful concluding theme.

I'd recommend this novel to those who enjoy contemporary young adult novels with deeper themes. Thank you RB Media/Recorded Books for the gifted ALC in exchange for an honest and unbiased review.

This audiobook was a pleasant listen. The themes the book touched upon were really important and I was glad to read and later think about them. I felt that maybe the ghost aspect was a bit disorganized, though. That aside, I can recommend this to those who enjoy young adult contemporaries.

This was very good. I requested this on a whim and received a ALC from NetGalley and I really enjoyed it. I listened to it in just a few hours because I was so captivated that it just kind of kept doing things that would allow me to continue listening. It is about Sara who is 15 years old she comes from a Uzbek Afghan family and has loads of intergenerational trauma.

Her parents are separated and her beloved grandmother is dying and has dementia. She has all these family members but no one can tell her anything about her family. So when her mom starts construction on an old house, Sara didn't really expect to be haunted by ghosts from her past.

I liked how much of this story was about healing and relearning your own history. I felt all of the emotions and it will kind of put you through the ringer. This is not an easy read but it is a quick read. Everything happens quickly and it keeps you invested from page to page. There is a supernatural element alongside generational family trauma and healing and mental health and friendships and all of that fun things that go along with being 15 years old. Overall this is one that I really enjoyed and would recommend!

Format: audiobook ~ Narrator: Ariana Delawari
Content: 4 stars ~ Narration: 5 stars

Fifteen-year-old Sara can’t accept her parents’ divorce, and her beloved grandma Bibi Jan is gradually losing her memory.

Sara’s extended family is large. She is from an Afghan-Uzbek family. Bibi Jan had eleven children, ten daughters and one son. Sara's grandparents came to America in search of a better life for themselves and their children. Sara is trying to collect the stories of her family to find a missing piece of the puzzle.

House of Yesterday is a very nice contemporary YA fiction with bits of magical realism. The narration is excellent.

Thanks to Recorded Books for the ALC and this opportunity! This is a voluntary review and all opinions are my own.

I give this book 4.5 stars
House of Yesterday is THAT BOOK. It has topics of culture,marriage,divorce and family. This book has many layers of past and present. Our main character is 15 and is struggling to grasp her parents divorce. Her grandma is the only family member she has that makes her feel comfortable and whole. However, unfortunately her grandma is also deteriorating. This book is overwhelming and had me tearing up several times. I could relate on so many levels and it helped me come to peace when I finished it. I would highly recommend this book. Thank you for allowing me to listen to this audio book.
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.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

House of Yesterday focuses on Sara, whose parents are going through a divorce she is struggling to accept. The one person she can depend on, her Bibi Jan, is struggling with dementia, leaving Sara alone. As she plunges herself into the family business and renovates a house to forget her life, she starts to discover family secrets that send her down a spiral. What is her Bibi Jan hiding?

I was hoping for more out of this book. The book is meant to touch on family trauma, grief, immigration, and belonging. Unfortunately, the book felt split between Sara’s parents divorcing and family secrets without diving deep into either topic. I would’ve preferred if the author had picked one of these storylines to follow and develop.

Sara’s painful recollection of her parents’ fighting never got the full attention it deserved. Some of the scenes were intense, yet the plot moved along like this trauma was not important enough to explore. I wanted to watch Sara grow into her emotions and process all the wrong doings in her family more than she did.

The ghost aspect of this book felt unnecessary. Sara never questioned the ‘visions’ she saw and she disappeared so often, I’m surprised her family didn’t lock her away. The story might’ve done better if told through letters, diaries, notes, etc. than a paranormal element. I could see how this story could have been similar to Haunting of Hillhouse- where the house is alive and lays out the family’s grief. But the story often felt disjointed and the elements didn’t serve to truly aide in Sara’s emotional development.

Again, I wished I loved this more! The cover is stunning, the author has such potential in her writing and themes and I look forward to what else she will write. Unfortunately, this book spread itself thin and didn’t evoke the emotions it was meant to out of me.

Sara is not doing great, her parents have had one fight too many and have been separated for some time now, her grandmother is losing her memory and she hasn't talked to her best friend in a while.
Things go from bad to worse when she runs into a girl no one else can see. She doesn't know who she is but she can see her memories and they're related to her family so Sara will do everything in her power to figure out what the deal is.

This was good. I liked the main character, who was so very flawed and layered and I thought that made her captivating. I really wanted to understand what the heck was going on and I enjoyed seeing Sara's relationships evolve with everyone around her.
Basically, this was a good, enjoyable book but I wasn't 100% in. I listened to it on audio (thank you also Netgalley), and I had some trouble staying focused all the time. But that was probably just a me problem. I would definitely recommend this to anyone looking for a family story that has a supernatural element, especially if you want a story that isn't the ordinary one you've read over and over again. I will definitely be on the lookout for more from this author.

Sara’s life is falling apart. Her parents’ divorce is looming, her Bibi Jan struggles to remember who people are, and a secret that changes everything Sara knows about her family bubbles up. As Sara helps work on her mother’s latest home renovation, she realizes that the house holds these family secrets she so desperately craves to know, which keeps her coming back for more.

This story is one that’s hard to put down. I read it in two sittings, but the only reason I took a break was for work. There’s family drama going on both in the present and the past and Sara isn’t sure what to think anymore. As Sara got sucked into the story of her family, so did I, even through the uglier parts.

This story is set in the summer, and while I’d recommend this book for any time of the year, I’d definitely be interested in rereading during the summer for that atmosphere!