By Sola Mahfouz and Malaina Kapoor

Reviewed by Pennell Paugh

October 18,2023 (San Diego) -- Sola Mahfouz, who now lives in the U.S., recounts her life story to Malaina Kapoor, a writer and producer of the nationally syndicated public affairs radio program, In Deep.

The city of Kandahar, where Mahfouz’s family lived, became the site for battles between the Taliban and the government. Born in 1996, just two years after the Taliban’s rise in power, Mahfouz shares how Afghanistan’s women lived in a state of oppression.

The book begins:

I began to grow up the day my mother warned me to stop laughing. She was terrified that even my momentary giggle could bring a strange man to our door, ready to yell, kidnap, or even kill to silence the sounds of a young woman. Don’t dance outside your room, she’d warn me. Don’t sing in the hallways, where the sound can carry. I was eleven years old.