In this startlingly honest—and troubling—depiction of her life in Afghanistan, Kamela Mohammadi chronicles the brutality and repression inflicted on girls and women in a country ruled by a rigid theocracy and pervasive ignorance. Born in Northern Afghanistan in 1993, Kamela was taken by her family to Iran where she spent her first ten years. Her father, longing for his native village, returned his family to the mountain settlement in 2004. Kamela was shocked to find the primitiveness of village life (e.g., the “kitchens” featured a fire pit with an open hole in the ceiling for the smoke), the rigidity of the male/female roles and her father’s transformation into a brutal tyrant. At the insistence of his brother, her father married a second wife. Together, her father and his new wife inflict cruel hardships on the family of the first wife. Kamela’s family entered years of lack of proper nutrition, of insufficient fuel to warm their frigid house in Afghanistan’s deep winter, and of constant physical and emotional abuse. After her mother fled with her four children to Kabul, fourteen-year-old Kamela was kidnapped from the city’s streets. Within days, she was married off in a ceremony at which she was not even present. (This is legal in Afghanistan.) Unwilling to submit to her fate, Kamela soon made a successful escape from the shackles of a primitive and harrowing servitude. Reunited with her mother, Kamela discovered a language school nearby and committed to learning English. Because of her new language ability, Kamela was recruited by the US military as a linguist. Her service earned her access to US citizenship. At 21, she left Afghanistan for the US hoping to bring her family eventually. Soon, however, the Taliban were back in control of Afghanistan, and her family was caught in the crazy ignorance of the new régime. Kamela Mohammadi now lives in the US where she earned a college degree and is endeavoring to bring her family here from a refugee camp in Pakistan.