Prior to reading Playing for Freedom, I had only read one book set in or about Afghanistan: The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. However, this is my first nonfiction and memoir, and I was intrigued to learn about Afghanistan today from the perspective of a young woman.

The memoir begins with a triumph in Zarifa Adiba’s young life: her opportunity to serve as orchestra conductor for the all-girls Afghan orchestra on a trip to Davos, Switzerland. Not only was the performance a success, the interviews Zarifa gave were eye-opening to non-Afghans around the world. But upon returning to Kabul, Afghanistan, Zarifa still had a long road ahead of her on her journey to achieving her many goals.

From here, Playing for Freedom dives into different aspects of Afghanistan’s culture and politics, as well as Zarifa’s own family circumstances. She talks about the extremist conservative society, which puts so many limits on women and considers music a sin. She also describes her complicated, often toxic family, from her fraught relationship with her mother to her frequently being passed around from one household to another. It’s often heartbreaking to learn how isolating and unsupportive her family could be, largely due to the societal views on women. Zarifa would sometimes stay with family in Pakistan, but her home was ultimately still in Kabul.

I love how Zarifa is such a strong-willed and confident young woman. She is still Muslim, like most in Afghanistan, but she takes on a more liberal and modern approach to her faith. She doesn’t see music as a sin, nor does she think women’s hair being visible should be considered scandalous. By her society’s standards, Zarifa is a “bad girl” and proud of it. She is also an unapologetic feminist who believes in the power of education and emancipating women and girls throughout her country. I enjoyed hearing about her admiration for Michelle Obama and how the former First Lady was a role model for Zarifa. Seeing other trailblazers can be so inspiring in forging your own path!

There were major hurdles to overcome during Zarifa’s childhood and early adulthood, from family issues to the devastating effects of violence in Afghanistan, but I love how she overwhelming takes an optimistic and hopeful view, both about the future of Afghanistan and of her own goals.

Playing for Freedom is an inspiring and eye-opening account of one brave young woman. Zarifa Adiba believes in Afghan women becoming true equals in society, being allowed to get an education, and being allowed to play music and sports without derision. I appreciated learning more about Afghanistan from a young person’s perspective, and I admire the author’s vision and leadership.

Zarifa lives in Afghanistan, where women are regarded as property, to be sold or married off. Girls do not have the same privileges as boys; very few go to school. Music is forbidden. A girl like Zarifa who dares to dream, to go against the grain, to pursue an education, escape her family's marriage schemes, and ultimately find her own place in the world, will be mocked or even killed.
I enjoyed learning Zarifa's story-how she enrolled in an Afghan musical school despite the risks and how she visited Yale during her orchestra's trip to the United States.
I was honestly worried she was going to turn liberal simply because of the extreme rules she lived under in Afghanistan, but this never ended up really being an issue.
She does identify herself as a Muslim, which might deter some people from reading the story.

Overall, though, I did enjoy the story.

Thank you to Net Galley for the opportunity to review this book.

I enjoyed this memoir! I am grateful to be able to gain a better understanding of what life was/is like for a girl in Afghanistan.

Playing for Freedom by Zarifa Adiba; Anne Chaon is a compelling story about the Journey of a Young Afghan Girl.
This book was very well written. I loved Zarifa‘s writing style. Her descriptions were so vivid that I felt as though I were in the scenes with her characters.

Thank You NetGalley and Amazon Crossing for your generosity and gifting me a copy of this amazing eARC!

This is a passionate memoir written by Zarifa Adiba describing her upbringing in Afghanistan in the period before the Taliban returned to power in 2021. As a child her life was difficult, her father dead and her mother remarried to his nephew with four younger half siblings, all living in poverty under the control of her father’s family. Zarifa’s passion to music led her led her to study at the co-educational Afghanistan National Institute of Music (ANIM) in Kabul, founded in 2010 after 30 years of war, by a wonderful musician, Dr Ahmad Sarmast, on his return from asylum in Australia. As Zarifa’s father’s family considered both co-education and the playing of non-religious music to be against Islamic law, she had to keep this a secret from them.

Zarifa’s remarkable memoir paints a vivid picture of life in Afghanistan before the Taliban returned to power. Even then life was difficult for women who didn’t conform to strict Islamic laws. They were subject to hatred, verbal and often physical abuse by men. Zarifa’s life was especially difficult, especially after her step-father Basir travelled to Indonesia to wait unsuccessfully for years for a visa to Australia. As well as attending school she had to work to provide for her mother and younger half siblings, but instead of being appreciated, she was reviled and cruelly treated by her mother as the cause of her problems and often sent away for long periods, disrupting her education.

A remarkably brave and resilient young woman, faced with all these difficulties, she persevered with her dreams to forge a path she hoped other young women could follow, not knowing that these hopes and dreams for her country were about to be set back centuries by the return of the Taliban. Her story is passionately told and her voice resonates strongly through the narrative. Originally published in 2021 in French, the English translation is now being published, along with an afterword by Zarifa, now living in America and pursuing her dreams.

Usually, I don't really read much Nonfiction books, but I do read memoirs, and if it sounds interesting or written by someone famous, then I would read. Initially, I thought this was a fiction until I actually did a search on this book, when I realized that this was actually a memoir about a young Afghan girl, who would work tirelessly and endlessly, clashing with the Afghan culture to fulfill her dreams of becoming a musician and going to the university.

If you have read I am Malala by Malala Yousafzai, then I highly recommend that you should read this book.

Zarifa is an ambitious Afghan woman who comes from a poor Hazara family. At sixteen, Zarifa joins Afghanistan National Institute of Music. By eighteen, she is the lead violinist, conductor of the all women orchestra named Zohra and one of their performances including performing in the World Economic Forum in Switzerland. But despite Zohra's hard success and achievement, most of the girls that Zarifa knows are forced into arranged marriages. Zarifa also faced many obstacles from her family, who shunned her for her keen interest in music and the fact that she was defiant and refused to cover her hair and marry someone like her cousins. Playing for Freedom talks about how Zarifa yearned for independence and study at the university and how she overcame many obstacles to succeed as a person she is today.

I am not going to put too much details but this is a beautifully written memoir and I was glad to get a privilege to read this memoir. The way women were treated in Afghanistan in a men dominated world, the Taliban rule...sometimes, it's hard to imagine that cruelty can exist. I enjoyed reading this book and was glad that now Zarifa and her family are now living in New York away from now Taliban rule Afghanistan.

Overall I rate this book five stars.

Many thanks to Netgalley and Amazon for the ARC. The review is based on my honest opinion only.

Posted on Goodreads 4/12/2024. Will post on Amazon on release day.

This was a very inspiring memoir to read. This book follows Zarifa as she tries to pursue her dreams of being a musician while getting major backlash from her family and society in Afghanistan. Throughout the book, Zarifa discusses the Taliban, sexism, violence against women and Muslims, family pressure and disappointment, and how she withstood all of that to follow her dreams. This was a very powerful story, and I think this book is so important for everyone to read to understand what things are like in a community that faces ongoing brutality and political issues. This book will inform you of a community that might be different than your own, and it also is very inspirational for women who have dreams and aspirations that their family and/or society might not fully support. I appreciate how Zarifa shows resistance and strength throughout this book and still makes her dreams come true. I also appreciate that she spreads awareness across many platforms for what people go through in her home country.

Zarifa is a girl how as born in Afghanistan and has so many things stacked against her - like many Afghan Women. She joins a music school and learns the viola. That school and music unlock many opportunities for her future, despite her family/men/society not approving. She made so many choices to overcome the things stacked against her. She’s an inspiration to women everywhere and especially to women who live in Afghanistan and have the same kind of daily struggles.

Zarifa, if you read this, thank you for sharing your story.

#PlayingforFreedom #NetGalley

I love extraordinary tales of triumph!

This thought-provoking memoir from a debut author is one you’ll want on your reading list ASAP.

Zarifa Adiba had a dream so big, it was scary - she wanted to be a concert musician.

That doesn’t sound too much of a stretch for some of us who are musically inclined, does it?! (tongue in cheek) But to a child born in Kabul, Afghanistan, a FEMALE born in one of the worst places to be a female, it was an uphill battle. Firstly, she was female. Secondly, she was Hazara, an oppressed Shiite minority. Her family was poor and uneducated. Thirdly, music was considered sinful under Islamic law. Fourthly, she had no prior background in music; never played and never read music.

None of these stopped her from dreaming.

She prepared tirelessly.

She overcame challenges, defied societal norms and stereotypes in her deeply conservative and patriarchal society, and went on to accumulate many, many ‘firsts.’ Her courage and passion for music in the face of significant obstacles will astound you. In our part of the world, her achievements make her a star, but in her home country, it made her a target and she had to flee for her life.

Music offered Zarifa a chance to blossom, to escape, to have a future, and to show herself, her family, her country and the rest of the world what Afghan women are capable of doing. It saddens me to (1) think that despite all her achievements, her new identity now “puts her at odds with her culture and her family” and (2) that she couldn’t receive the support she needed from her parents because the regime had beaten their dreams out of them. I have so very much to be thankful for and I take it for granted.

I appreciated a look at her home life, her school experience, and her achievements. This book left me wanting more and I’ve queued up some TedTalks and articles to help flesh out my experience and answer some questions.

I was gifted this copy by Amazon Crossing and NetGalley and was under no obligation to provide a review.

I really enjoyed reading this book, it was a great memoir and I was glad I got to read this story. I’m glad Zarifa was able to share this story with us and it was well written.

I want to thank netgalley for an advanced ARC of this novel

This is a memoir of Zarifa and her life in afangastan & how music was so important to her seeing her journey from high school to collage, Michelle Obama inspired her and I always belive that everyone should have someone who inspires them to do or become better. I had fun reading this though my kindle and I would definitely say its worth the read

As a young music student, Adiba's concern was not how to find time to practice or whether she could afford a better instrument—both owning her own instrument and practicing at home were unthinkable. This was Afghanistan, after all, and music was at best distrusted. People who played music were distrusted. *Girls* who played music were distrusted. Adiba held fast to her dreams of playing viola for Afghanistan and for the world, but every day was a challenge.

"In those days," writes Adiba, "I had so little money that I couldn't even afford the ten afghanis (less than four American cents) it took to take the bus to music school. Instead, I walked for two hours every morning, from home to the ANIM, pacing along the damaged sidewalks of Kabul and crisscrossing the dusty city where high concrete walls had gradually sprung up in response to various threats, and to protect against explosions." (loc. 104*)

Adiba's story takes place before the Taliban took power in Kabul. She discusses this takeover at the beginning and end of the book, but for most of the book she is in an Afghanistan with some bare bones of possibility. Make no mistake: she had just about nothing easy. Start with being a girl in Afghanistan and add in poverty, and living with relatives who didn't want her family there, and a mother pushed to the breaking point by her own hard life—and then multiply that by, say, the pressure to get married to a man, *any* man, and turn away from any kind of freedom in exchange for a constrained and compliant life.

"Everyone around me seemed genuinely hopeful that I would go with him, settle in his village, and stay locked in his house, having children and doing chores for the rest of my life. The worst part was my mother seemed delighted at the prospect, which only reinforced my despair and sense of abandonment." (loc. 1262)

It's a journey full of impossible choices. I wouldn't have minded a more chronological structure—it's largely chronological, but with frequent zigzags—or more about Adiba's daily life in Afghanistan: what home looked like, what a school day looked like, how it felt to leave the viola at school at the end of each day and pick it up again in the morning. Most of what I've read about Afghanistan is from the perspective of outsiders, and I'd have loved to see it better through Adiba's eyes. Her experience was unusual, too, in that although her family was poor she managed some travel, in and outside of the Middle East, while still quite young; among other things, she lived at various times in Pakistan, and I'd love to know more about how she experienced the differences of living there.

In many ways what interests me most is the way Adiba talks about her mother's life—with frustration, sometimes, and with hurt, because her mother was not always able to offer the kinds of emotional support that Adiba needed. But their stories are illustrative of two different ways in which women in oppressive societies struggle—Adiba, young and fighting to be allowed to follow her dreams; her mother, long since having lost sight of her own dreams and also unable to trust in her daughter's. It's a complicated story, and I'm glad it's been translated for an English-speaking audience.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.

Based on Goodreads, it looks like the US is late to this translation. Published in French Nov 2021, Italian Nov 2022, Turkish Jan 2022, The English version has a publication date of May 2024.

Playing for Freedom is Zarifa Adiba's first book. NetGally has this book listed as General Fiction (Adult). If I hadn't just double checked, i would have sworn that it was a memoir.

It is really interesting having the opportunity to have a glimpse into Zarifa's life. This book takes us from middle school into college. It is pretty cool that Michelle Obama has inspired this young woman from the other side of the globe and that Michelle's speechs were used by Zarifa to help her better understand English.

For being so poor in Afghanistan, I was always amazed as to how Zarifa was able to travel so much.

There was definitely some conflict between mother and daughter.

Many, many thanks to NetGalley and AmazonCrossing for the opportunity to review Playing For Freedom in exchange for an honest review.