It pains me to say this because I really "like" the story and the topic of this book, and I thought the way Atia Abawi told her story of living in Afghanistan for 5 years was really fascinating...but the writing style of this book feels a bit amateur. It's very 'in your face', almost portraying blalk-and-white figures, rather than the 'complexity' of the people that Atia Abawi refers to in the acknowledgments and the way she talked about it at NCTE.