This book was an excellent narrative of the stores of several women living in the Garden District of Cairo prior to the uprisings in Egypt. I read it in high school and return to their stories over and over again as helping me to understand women in Egypt better. ( )

I think this book was written very well. It was easy to read with incredibly vivid descriptions. However, I felt like the moral of the stories about many of the woman in this book was that "it's ok to settle." The author seemed to be telling us that settling for whatever comes along is the way to contentment, rather than looking for what we truly want in life. ( )

This is another book on the lives of Muslim women. I have read a few but I liked the way this story was told.
It tells the story through the eyes of a young American student living in the Garden City district of Cairo. She has come to learn Arabic but she learns much more from the Egyptian women she meets, first Huda and her mother and grandmother and secondly women in the apartment block where she lives. She learns of inflexible traditons, of arranged marriages, of secret romances that last a lifetime, and of the bonds within families between mothers and daughters and fathers and daughters. The characters were interesting, appealing, you could feel empathy for their situations and I liked the way the story was written. Worth a read. ( )

Can almost see, smell, breathe the dust of Cairo, hear the clamor, feel the pain ( )