A review by zhelana
Between Two Worlds: Escape from Tyranny: Growing Up in the Shadow of Saddam by Laurie Becklund, Zainab Salbi

challenging dark emotional informative medium-paced

4.0

I have no idea how to process this book. It is the memoirs of a girl who grew up in Saddam Hussein's inner circle. Her first memory is of him taking a family heirloom that had no emotional meaning to him but lots to her family merely because he couldn't stand the idea of someone else having something pretty. And so it continues with Saddam's small cruelties becoming news making cruelties as she gets older and her parents can no longer hide who he is from her. Eventually Saddam starts becoming sexually interested in her and her parents marry her off to a guy from America. She divorces him but is stuck here when America closes the border to Iraq during the first gulf war. Now she's often on the news when they discuss Iraq and I've seen her twice since starting to read this book. She started an organization to help women who were raped by militaries in Kosovo and then expanding to DRC and finally expanding back to Iraq. It was interesting, and I wanted to know what happened to her but it wasn't very well written and I kept finding myself having to go back and reread things to understand what had just been said, or wondering vaguely who was referred to by a pronoun or just small writing issues, that I guess make sense for someone writing in their second language but are annoying in trying to read a book. But really I can't fault her for trying to write in English, there's much more of an audience for this book in America than there is in Arab nations. And she did much better than I would do at trying to write a book in Spanish. So there's that. Anyway, I don't think this is going to be one of the highlights of this year, but I'm glad I read it.