Veil of Roses by Laura Fitzgerald

While the heroine of this book is an adult woman, I feel as thought I was reading a coming of age book.

I found this character to be so compelling that I could not put this book down until I knew her whole story.
When we meet Tamila Soroush, she is living in Iran with her parents where she has grown up. Her parents had lived in the United States but we find that they came back to Iran when Tamila was a very small child and have remained there ever since.

We find Tamila, not really moving forward in her life, when her parents make arrangements for her to go to the United States on a three month Visa. Their hope is that Tamila will meet someone, through her sister, and marry and be able to stay in the U.S.

This book allows us to watch Tamila as she vocalizes the frustrations that she feels with her life, and the lives of all women in Iran. We are allowed to witness her making friends and learning what freedom means to women in America. I found her explorations and her limitations to be poignant and frustrating. When her sister, treats Tamila as a child, in my opinion, I get so upset. I feel that her sister should have a better understanding than anyone of what it must mean for Tamila to be able to move about at her own will for the first time in her life.

I hope that I have not said too much about this book but I have to say, I loved this book. I loved the choice that she ultimately makes and I am so glad that I read it. Now that does not happen often.

Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

I am always interested in how other people live and what they are thinking.
When I read Infidel, I was hoping to get an idea of what it is like to grow up Muslim. This book was so much more than that for me.

Ali, strips herself and her family bare to give us a glimpse of her world and the life forces that brought her to a way of thinking that was cataclysmic for herself and her family relationships.

I expected a book that would tell me about what being Muslim in Africa might mean to one woman. I did not expect to catch glimpses of some of my own family members while reading. At the beginning of this book, Ali is describing what it was to have to recite her family line back many generations, while I have no experience that mirrors this exactly, I do remember hearing and being asked so many times, as a child and young woman, darling who are you? Who are your people? Who is your granddaddy? Where are they from? I still feel the pressure of not giving answers that would be satisfactory to the elders that posed these questions. I know that this experience is not quite the same as what was asked of Ali by her grandmother but for a moment I had to stop reading and gather myself and wonder, if the questions that I had been asked all my life were some deep ancestral questions that were as much a part of who we are as a people, as other inherited traits.

Anyway, I digress, Ali allows us to witness what it was like to grow up as a practicing but not very observant Muslim. We then witness her transformation, as a young lady, into a more devout Muslim. Finally, as she begins to really understand herself as a woman and the free thinking adult that she has been fighting to be, we see her put away her long held beliefs.

We see what civil unrest and integration to another country are like through the eyes of someone who actually experienced those things, as well as what it was like for Ali to become immersed in another culture.

This book will remain with me for years to come. If not the actual content, then the heart of what it meant to me. I have told many people read Infidel, it is not what you think, it is so much more.