It is hard to not judge an autobiography, from a different culture and time.  Yet the hard and horrible experiences had here are not unusual or exclusive to  the authors’ experience. Child marriage, abuse of girls and women, people unwilling to have compassion for girls caught in a system that no one is willing to change.   How can she remain positive in the midst of such a life?

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Describing her parents, she loved them in spite of all the actions hurtful to her and her siblings they thought nothing about.  She  looked to aunts and uncles quite different households than her’s without envy, but gave her hope.  After being married off at age eleven, to a twenty-seven year old man who raped and abused her, she found joy in the man;s mother, “Bibi”, who considered “her Najima”  ike the daughter bibi never had…and the child found Bibi to be…