This book defies categorization: is it a drama? Mystery? Coming-of-age?
However you want to describe it, it captured me and did not let me go until I finished the book less than 3 days later -- a feat I haven't accomplished since I was in high school with nothing else to do with my days.

This semi-autobiographical novel by Etaf Rum at first seems like an immigrant story as it tells the story of Isra, a young woman from Pakistan who is married into an American-raised Arab family, and travels to New York expecting a new life like the ones she's read about in books. But it quickly turns into more as her story is intersected with that of her mother-in-law Fareeda's, as well as Isra's oldest daughter, Deya, 18 years after the move to New York. Even while the book jumps between the early 1990s and 2008, between Fareeda, Isra, and Deya, the story is expertly woven together to tell the mother's and daughter's parallel, coming-of-age stories as they struggle to accept their arranged marriages and their place in their ultra-traditional culture, and Fareeda, who enforces it.

This book is beautifully, but sharply, written, with so much emotion and tension built in. The reader cannot help but become connected to the stories of all these women, empathize with them, and learn more about these real experiences and faced by women every day. However, the true value of this book lies not only in its portrayal of this story that needed to be told, but also in its messages that can transcend all of intersectional feminism: how all women are constrained by societal expectations, how so many women are still victims of domestic violence, how hard it is to change a culture that allows it.

"Whatever any woman said, culture could not be escaped. Even if it meant tragedy, even if it meant death."