“There are things in this life no one should see,” she tells the young woman her son has beaten, as she smears foundation over the bruises on her daughter-in-law’s face. “When I was your age, I never let anyone see my shame.”

Etaf Rum’s debut novel is about arranged marriages, oppression, patriarchy, domestic violence, fear, trauma, and freedom that span three generations of conservative Palestinian-American women. It's a book that aims to tell the story about women who are “born without a voice".

The story is told with four narrators in two parallel timelines, feeling often repetitive as conversations and conflicts take place over and over in both timelines (and domestic violence is hard to read).

This book is an intimate glimpse into a controlling and closed cultural world, of being born and bred in an oppressive culture. It is sad and dark. However, what makes this book worth reading is the honest portrayals of the characters: a woman is a woman everywhere.