A fascinating, if rather grim, introduction to a part of the world and a culture with which I was utterly unfamiliar. Colonialism is evil--and yet Fadhma A.M. Amrouche would likely not have survived the "shame" of her illegitimate birth without her mother's clever decision to appeal to the French colonial authorities when threatened by her late husband's family. Nor would she have received the education that enabled her, eventually, to commit her story to writing, without her mother's decision to send her to an orphanage run by the French. So there is Fadhma's story--of her education, marriage, endless succession of childbirths, struggle against illness, poverty, and prejudice from all sides. There are the descriptions of the (mostly) small-minded spitefulness of village life--no wonder people all over the world gravitate to cities! And the endless work of women: "washing, carding, combing, spinning and weaving the wool, working the fields, picking her figs, her grapes, her olives, doing the housework, cooking, sieving and grinding corn, barley and acorns, carrying water and wood." (p. 37) The girls of the house glean the fields after the harvest, just as in Biblical times. (p. 126). -- From http://www.goodreads.com (Oct. 25, 2016).