A simple portrayal of opposite ends of humanity and the strength we can find within and from those who influence us. Beautiful, sad and full of courage. ( )

This was a difficult book for me to rate as it left me torn.
On the one hand as a person who is an empath and has a terror of torture, I felt I should have felt worse than I ended up feeling about the entire subject matter.

What bothered me a lot was the constant murder, torture, rape, etc of women, girls and children there that makes them total victims. Yet .................they do the same to their own children. They 'marry' off the children at a very young age, often to much older men for a profitable dowry, without any consent of the daughter and she does not get to see the man until the wedding day itself.

Virginity is prized nearly above everything, so they keep that miserable tradition of showing the bloodied cloth after the first sexual encounter and heaven help her if it can't be produced. Women are illiterate there, have no job skills, and are beaten regularly.

So while many people feel that women there are victims, and naturally they are, no doubt, yet, they seem to be swallowed up by a religion and culture that allows them to marry their young daughters off, turn her into a non stop baby machine and get beaten.

Naturally I am thinking and evaluating everything thru Western eyes and thoughts, and I stand by that. No mother in her right mind, and I don't care where she comes from should be ok with making her 12 year old daughter marry a stranger of 40 or more.

Time magazine rated Afghanistan as the worst place on earth for women, and after this, The land of Blue Burquas, and Kabul Beauty School, I agree 1,000%.

It also seems that going to an arena to watch the Taliban cut off people's hands and bringing their children to watch, smile and clap over it is serial killer-psychopath territory. ( )

This book is so badly written/translated that it is not worth picking up. Zoya grows up in Kabul with activist parents who disappear when she is a child. She is smuggled to Pakistan where she joins a women's group called RAWA which helps women, children refugees fleeing the Taliban. ( )

Zoya's mother was a member of RAWA, and her father of another under ground group. They were both killed when she was a girl, and she eventually became a member of RAWA itself. She was born about 1979,and she grows up under President Najibullah ("the puppet regime," as she calls it.), then witnesses the Taliban taking power. An interesting note; in her book the energy the Soviets spent in fighting in Afghanistan is linked to the downfall of the Soviet Union in 1989. RAWA sent her abroad to speak on its behalf, and she met her coathors in Rome. I wish more had been said about how they collaborated on the book; you sense that she told her story, they asked questions and wrote it. It's a very human story. In it one gets the sense that RAWA actually functions in a similar way to the madrassas, or Taliban schools, in that they attempt to become replacement parents to the orphans or students, and are definitely teaching them a certain way to look at the world. They are also indoctrinating warriors, not just educating children. Nonviolent warriors, but warriors just the same. It's not that I don't agree with the cause, as I understand it, it's just sad. ( )

Zoya recounts the atrocities inflicted on the woman and innocent people of Afghanistan people by both the Taliban and the Mujaheddin warlords. For such a young girl she has seen and suffered so much but is wise beyond her years. ( )