"'Can you buy me?' I asked the Iranian filmmaker who had been documenting my life for three years. Now, it seemed her protagonist was about to be sold into marriage. What a terrible ending for a documentary.
'You have six months before your wedding,' my mother said.
Enough time to plan my escape." (loc. 65*)

Growing up in Afghanistan, Alizada's path seemed clear: at some point her parents would find a husband for her, and then she'd be married and have children. The end. As a child, she didn't question this—a wedding would mean new clothing, a party, excitement. And with girls not allowed to go to school, she couldn't conceive of another possibility. But the older Alizada got, the more she saw how bleak her projected future looked.

"Now that her veil was up, I recognized her. We had been at her wedding just a few months before. Why was she marrying again? I was too young to understand what scared her so much that the spoonful of cake in her hand trembled: after her husband died, she had to marry her brother-in-law." (loc. 589)

What follows is a harrowing story of a girl growing up and desperately trying to outsmart a system that didn't allow her any choice. It sounds like Alizada's family was constantly on the brink of poverty; money aside, not only could she as a girl not go to school, nobody in her family could read, and none of them had a real concept of the wider world:

"'I am from Herat too,' the man said. 'The war has scattered all of us like seeds. My oldest sister is in Turkey, and my brothers are in America. Do you know where Turkey and America are?'
'So far we only only about Afghanistan, India, and Iran—are there more countries?' asked Razeq. The man looked at all of us and told us that there are many more countries that we haven't even seen pictures of." (loc. 1351)

As refugees in Iran, their lives were safer—no threat of being snatched off the street by the Taliban—but not less fraught. As undocumented immigrants, they still had no rights; they still could not go to school. Besides, Alizada's parents didn't see the point: "Nana and Baba reminded me that there was no need for me to know how to write names. Soon I would be married, and learning to write my husband's name was no accomplishment if I couldn't make him food." (loc. 1786) And they did not see a future in Iran, either; their homeland was Afghanistan, Taliban or no Taliban.

It's a difficult read. Alizada is so blunt about the things she saw and experienced, and it makes for the kind of painful and raw read that required, especially early on, reading in short bursts rather than plunging on through. The writing is a bit hit or miss, but it's a really valuable story. I read Khalida Popal's "My Beautiful Sisters" recently, and the similarities and differences are so striking—Popal's family had more financial advantages and was much more supportive of her going to school, using her voice, etc., but both women were trapped under the same regime and determined that there must be something better. They both got out (not a spoiler), but the details differ...except that for both women it required incredible amounts of determination and bravery. And it feels especially important to read women's stories from Afghanistan now, when so few women there can safely share those stories.

I won't get into the rap music part of things here, but it's an important part of the story—worth looking up Alizada's song "Daughters for Sale".

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

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