Embracing Life Without Puppets
A Review of The Unravelling of Ou by Hollay Ghadery
Hollay Ghadery’s debut novel, The Unravelling of Ou, opens with the arresting sight of a frazzled middle-aged woman with frizzy hair, Minoo, running down a hospital hallway, a crudely made sock puppet on her hand. Her daughter, Roya, has just given birth to a baby girl. Fed up with Minoo’s endless dependence on this raggedy support toy, Roya orders her mother to leave and issues an ultimatum: cut ties with the puppet, Ecology Paul, or lose her daughter and granddaughter.
What follows is the story of Minoo’s struggle to reconnect with the people she loves and, most importantly, with her true self, told from the unusual perspective of a sock puppet. Ecology Paul is the latest in a series of communication toys Minoo has created over the years to navigate a world calibrated for others. “She’d created me—all of us—to help her make sense of herself,” he says. “We have always been an expression of feeling she could not otherwise articulate, or curiosity she couldn’t let herself explore: playfulness, sexiness, authority.”
By using Ecology Paul as her narrator, Ghadery deftly establishes a theatrical tone for her exploration of complex themes. Having a puppet mediate Minoo’s traumatic upbringing means that scenes become as much about a formative event as about how people smuggle pain into language. The puppet understands his performative function. “I was here because Minoo was too scared to be,” he tells us. He lifts her fear “however temporarily.” As we get to know Ecology Paul, our appreciation for Minoo’s attachment to him grows.
“Minoo was never so ashamed of who she was until she saw herself through the eyes of her mother,” says Ecology Paul, distilling a lifetime of internalized judgment into a single, blunt sentence. Minoo’s mother verbally abused her as a child. After Minoo’s traumatic teenage pregnancy in Iran, she was physically separated from her child and sent to Canada. Minoo internalizes her mother’s shame – it extends to the parts of herself she was trained to treat as dangerous, including her sexuality, queerness, and neurodiversity.
Drawing on her background as a poet, Ghadery peppers the book with breathtakingly beautiful phrases. For instance, Minoo felt that her body was “a wound she’d had to endure.” When Ghadery writes about the bond between a mother and child, her evocative language is so precise it feels physical. “For a time, life had been so gentle,” she writes. “Gentle as her lips on the mid-leg fold of her baby’s thigh. She could feel the warmth of their faces pressed together, cheek to cheek, in sleep. Her baby.”
With such passages, Ghadery underscores the intensity of the bond between mothers and children. It stands in contrast to the disconnection and cruelty that mark many of Minoo’s encounters with mother figures. Ghadery’s narrative echoes itself as Minoo reflects on how she arrived at this place. The flashes of motherly attachment underscore that the ultimatum driving the plot is not merely about a puppet; it stems from Roya’s desire to connect with Minoo and experience her motherly affection, unfiltered by a prop.
The Unravelling of Ou is a lyrical, clear-eyed novel about the cost of growing up feeling unsafe in your own body. This unforgettable tale examines motherhood, female sexuality, queerness, neurodiversity, and the double-edged nature of compassion in an Iranian-Canadian family shaped by patriarchy. Ghadery avoids easy uplift and offers readers something more rewarding: an exquisitely crafted story in which survival is hard-won and self-understanding is the first step toward something like freedom.
About the Book:
About the Author
Hollay Ghadery is an Iranian-Canadian multi-genre writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, (Guernica Editions 2021) won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. She is the author of Rebellion Box (Radiant Press, 2023) and Widow Fantasies (Gordon Hill Press, 2024). She is a host on The New Books Network and HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM, and the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com. The Unraveling of Ou, is her debut novel.
About the Reviewer
Chris Reed is a Toronto-based Freelance Book Publicist and Occasional Book Reviewer. Chris Reed (@reedbookspublicity on Substack)
Book Details
Publication Date: February 2026
ISBN 978-1-997508090
Publisher: Palimpsest Press
200 pages
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