Isra is so naive and hopeful and unloved, her story is truly devastating. She spends so many years just wanting someone to love her. Neglected and beaten as a child because she is a girl and then married off to a stranger and forced to move across the world to a country where she barely speaks the language. She is so hopeful that as long as she does everything right, does her best to please Adam and his family, they will love and accept her. Everything that goes wrong for her, that keeps them from loving her, is so out of her control. She accepts what she believes she deserves because she has never been treated like anything of worth. All because she is a woman. And when she realises that her daughters will face the same fate, it’s almost too much to bear.

Deya, Isra’s daughter, struggles to understand her place in the world as the daughter of immigrants. Born and raised in the United States, she’s not truly American. But when Fareeda starts arranging meetings with boys to arrange her marriage before she’s graduated from high school, she’s forced to figure out her place in the world and what that means not only for herself but for her family and her culture.

Three generations of women, raised in different times and places, but with the same values. Their voices and stories came together to tell a familiar story from a new perspective, for me at least. I thoroughly enjoyed this heartbreaking, incredibly devastating story. In order to move forward as a society and a community, we must face and overcome our ingrained values and shared histories.