See the entwined pair of hands? Although the girl and woman never meet, they remain forever bound by both blood and experience over a tumultuous century in Afghanistan. The woman is Shekiba, the only daughter in a family of sons, whose gender alone makes her a target of abuse...
Not quite a teenager, Poni loses her 12-year-old best friend in violent increments: to too-early forced marriage, three failed suicide attempts, and finally to childbirth long before her natural time. Poni – and her fiercely supportive mother – are determined that Poni will somehow stay in school...
When her father dies, a girl and her mother's futures are forever altered. As a 14-year-old living in a 17th-century Persian village, she expected to be contentedly married, looking forward to starting her own family, not unlike her best friend who is already heavy with...
What began as gorgeous elegiac memory about misplaced courage and final hope as World War II comes to an end in the Pacific, devolves into a middle-aged man's tedious reflections about his search for meaningful connections, especially with women, as he recalls his privileged life...
In order to fully enjoy this manga, you first need to read its prequel, Princess Knight (in two volumes in English translation). Come back when you're finished ...
At 15, Faten is uprooted from her village life to become a live-in servant to a wealthy family in Beirut, where violence from the ongoing Lebanese Civil War seems neverending. Her father's decision to pull her out of school, to indenture her away from all...
Give me a story with two narratives interwoven through nonlinear timelines and, usually, I'll be one committed reader. The House Girl opens in 1852 rural Virginia with a teenage slave girl named Josephine, then fast forwards in the next chapter to Lina, an ambitious attorney...
If beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, then perhaps bad behavior might be, too. "In this book we are taking a look back through history at all manner of famous female felons," write mother/daughter author-team Jane Yolen and Heidi E. Y. Stemple (who,...
If the name Lauren Groff sounds familiar, that might be because her latest title, Arcadia, appears on oh-so-many Best-of-2012 lists. I admit I haven't yet read Arcadia (it's high in my 'must-read' pile), but if I have the option among an author's titles, short stories are usually my first choice. Just...
A couple of days after filing my feature on Pauline A. Chen, I got on the phone to ask her all the questions I couldn’t find answers to out there in the virtual world of google-ing. True confession moment: I admit I was a wee bit...
When the teenaged Pauline Chen arrived in Harvard Yard, her intention was to become a writer. The American-born daughter of Taiwanese parents, she grew up amidst Long Island’s endless strip malls and was determined – she wrote in July 2012 at Tribute Books – to shed her “provincial” upbringing....
Already designated “definitive political biography” on its back cover, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks by Brooklyn College political science professor Jeanne Theoharis will reside in my personal reading history as the most difficult book I’ve ever reviewed. Never before – and hopefully never...
Given the monumental (continuous) changes post-Arab Spring, my recent (ongoing) search for women’s voices before and after led me to an unusual writer who defies many expectations of what it means to be internationally literary: Alifa Rifaat lives and works in a traditional Egyptian Muslim...
Those Dastardly Dames are increasing their fold (yippeee!), this time to welcome a 16th-century West African queen named Njinga, meaning "twist," because she was born with the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck! She certainly found her fighting spirit early on: as the eldest daughter...
What delighted anticipation I felt when I heard that Deborah Ellis' multi-award-winning Breadwinner Trilogy (The Breadwinner, Parvana’s Journey, and Mud City), after almost a decade since its completion, was becoming a tetrology! I adamantly hoped for such at the end of my Mud City post:...
Okay, here we go again (see Kabul Beauty School below). We have a (fascinating, allegedly true) story, and then the (disturbing) story about the (now accuracy-challenged) story. Just after the fall of the Taliban in 2001, an award-winning Norwegian journalist emerges from six weeks of following...
Writing a memoir these days is dangerous business: you can be outed on Oprah as the worst liar, along with your publisher (James Frey, A Million Little Pieces), you can become infamous overnight for breaking the hearts of millions who not only trusted you but even gave...
Zoya was just a year old when Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan in December 1979. By age 4, she made a Russian woman soldier cry when she refused to accept her proffered chocolate. She was raised mostly by her devout grandmother, while both parents worked to...
Mega-award-winning author Deborah Ellis’s active interest in Afghanistan began in 1996 when she heard about the Taliban takeover of that country "and the crimes they perpetrated against women and girls." She became involved with the Afghan communities in her native Canada, then traveled to meet...
As I look back on my post for Dreams of Joy's prequel, Shanghai Girls, I was clearly, quickly aware then that Janet Song was not the best choice for narrator. That I was somehow fooled into listening to Song again is surely a 'shame on...
