While Porochista Khakpour's slightly claustrophobic but entirely impressive debut novel Sons and Other Flammable Objects has its roots firmly planted in Western lit—the uniquely unhappy Adams family works to make sense of their lives despite debilitating Freudian roadblocks and expatriation from their native country—it also gallops over fresh ground in its examination of personal and political trauma in the "age of terrorism."

It's not uncommon—or, admittedly, insightful—to note a first novel as being self-conscious and overwrought, but it's often hard to look past Khakpour's stilted prose (notably, she has a unique affinity for hyphens and fragmented perspective). Fortunately, her strengths lie in plot lines, character development, and capturing the language of a family in a permanent state of culture shock. Xerxes, "Lala," and Daria Adam (son, mother, and father, respectively), an Iranian family displaced from Iran during the Islamic Revolution of 1979, they land in Eden Gardens, an apartment complex fraught with transparent biblical symbolism in an American suburb. Xerxes, in particular, is unable to shake his early memories; an air strike instills a phobia of fiery projectiles (um, flammable objects—my mistake) in the night sky, a fear that becomes increasingly portentous as they are made real in his new life. Turns out Xerxes's many issues stem primarily from one of any misunderstandings with his perpetually demonized father, who provides a template for Xerxes convoluted personal history.

Confused by negative experiences surrounding his ethnicity—a friend maliciously draws a camel on a Valentine, his father, Darius, takes him to a protest where a man lights himself on fire—Xerxes finds comfort in palatable, vaguely Middle Eastern I Dream of Genie episodes. The scene fits a recurring pattern of trite examples meant to exemplify both the American impression of the Middle Eastern man and the hostile Darius-Xerxes relationship and, in a far-fetched way, helps to deliver Xerxes to his fate at that hub of 21st century fear and mobility: the airport. Spoiler alert: Middle Eastern men are not put at ease in American hangars—sometimes, hint hint, only Mommy can understand and help.

Where Khakpour succeeds in drawing round primary characters, she often does so at the expense of caricaturing fringe ones—of course Xerxes falls in love with a stock Iranian neighbor he meets on the roof during the fall of the Twin Towers ... what else could happen? What is at the core a smart and sensitive novel is buried by convoluted over-reach—wholesale ideas that seem to work against themselves and stymie the simpler truths in a story of an immigrant's struggle for identity in a world that feels no obligation to grant him answers to his troubled past.—Jessica Candlin