Imagine being born in the land of the free, the United States of America, Brooklyn no less, but your grandparents still expect you to live by their Arab culture in which they grew up.  You are a teenage girl in high school, by the way, and college is not even an option because you must be married and sent off to live with your spouse’s family before it’s considered too late.  You’re lucky if you get to choose between several suitors, picked out by your family of course, because many girls are not graced with that privilege.  Moreover, it’s a privilege to be picked by a man’s family, especially if your family is poor, so it helps if you are attractive.

This is the life of 18 year old Deya, the eldest of four girls, and the year is 2008.  She desperately wants to go to college but her grandmother, Fareeda, refuses to entertain the idea because one must simply accept that a woman is no man.  After all, Fareeda herself has had to accept the plight of being someone’s wife, enduring domestic violence at a level incomprehensible to the rest of us.  Deya also desperately wishes she knew more about her mother, Isra, who supposedly died in a car accident with her father, Adam, and when she gets the opportunity, she chases after the truth at great risk.

Meanwhile, the author Etaf Rum takes the reader back to 1990 when 17 year old Palestinian, Isra, arrives in New York the day after her wedding to Adam, Fareeda’s son.  Their family fled poverty in Palestine some 15 years previously, and work tirelessly running a shop in Brooklyn.  Adam is the eldest of four children.  The youngest of Fareeda and Khaled’s kids is their only daughter, Sarah, who is expected to eventually suffer the same fate as every other female within their culture.  She and Isra become fast friends, bonding over forbidden books, which Isra hides in secret places of the dark basement bedroom that she and Adam share.

Isra comes to realise that the life of an Arab woman is no different in the United States.  She must still scrub the house clean, spend hours cooking for the men in the house and serve them when they return from work.  She does not have the freedom to even go shopping for food without her husband or father-in-law present.  Despite living to serve the men and be at their beck and call, baring a girl is dreaded amongst them all, so the resentment Fareeda feels towards Isra, when she keeps giving birth to girls, is insurmountable.  By the way, Isra is 22 years old when she is pregnant with her fourth girl, and is so emotionally and physically broken by Adam that she no longer has joy for her babies nor her books.

Despite the detailed descriptions of the oppressive lives of these women, you won’t want to put this novel down until you’ve reached the final word, when you’ll come to see that, indeed, a woman is no man.

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