From Publishers Weekly Bangladeshi doctor-turned-writer Nasrin (Shame) has been living in exile since 1994, after Muslim clerics issued a fatwa against her for her criticism of Islam's repression of women. In this moving but uneven memoir, (seized when it was published in Bangladesh in 1999), Nasrin writes hauntingly of a childhood of confusion and pain. During the violent 1971 war that created Bangladesh, she and her family fled to the countryside, where she was introduced to the limits on her freedom that would only increase as she grew older. As a girl in a Muslim family, Nasrin was not allowed to go to the store to buy candy; she could not even play outside. The memoir shows the young Nasrin trying to make sense of taboos (why isn't her mother allowed to go to the movies?) and the mysteries of adulthood (why doesn't any grownup seem happy?). Married to a man who openly cheated on her, Nasrin's mother finds solace in religion: she visits a spiritual leader so revered that women fight over his partially chewed betel leaf, hoping his spittle will help them get into heaven. Nasrin's father beats her and her siblings to exhort them to do well at school. But Nasrin's tale consistently heartbreaking and sometimes gorgeously written grows disorganized as it progresses: the chronology becomes confusing, anecdotes get repeated, and the abrupt ending leaves many questions unanswered.Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. Read more From School Library Journal Adult/High School-"Meyebela" means "girlhood"; Nasrin coined the word because Bengali lacked an equivalent term. Here, she remembers her life from early childhood in the mid '60s to adolescence in Bangladesh, a society bound by class, colonialism, religious extremism, and the terrible social disruption of civil war. In the author's dysfunctional extended family, physical and psychological abuse, including rape, incest, bullying, lying, superstition, and religious fanaticism, are the order of the day. Nasrin sees it all, but she is powerless to alleviate her own suffering or that of those she loves, and her experience is circumscribed by the boundaries of her family, with only brief forays beyond the home. Events are seen from the sometimes odd perspectives of a child's incomplete comprehension; developing insights are layered into the narrative and revealed in a roundabout fashion, as the author follows one theme in her inner life, then doubles back to another, with repetitions as the years go by. By the time she enters adolescence, still in possession of her judgment, one can see how she might grow up-as she in fact did-into a doctor, writer, and internationally acclaimed human-rights activist. Though readers may question the portrait Nasrin paints of her society, the madness of a death fatwa and mass demonstrations calling for her public execution serve to confirm the authenticity and continuing timeliness of her account. Readers who appreciate Arundhati Roy's God of Small Things (HarperCollins, 1998) will be sympathetic to Nasrin's girlhood, and hope for another volume of her memoirs.Christine C. Menefee, Fairfax County Public Library, VACopyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. Read more See all Editorial Reviews
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