The Pearl That Broke Its Shell by Nadia Hashimi

From the back cover: "A luminous and unforgettable tale of two women, destiny, and identity in Afghanistan."

Nothing I write about this novel will do it justice. 

I thought it was a wonderful book that took me into a world I knew nothing about. 

This book isn't a happy book. It is fiction, but probably could be a lot of snippets of life for a woman in Afghanistan.

Horrifying. It's horrifying what these characters live through daily, but just keep going. They are stronger than anybody I know. 

It follows two women in two different times. One a girl, and the other is her great great grandmother. Womanhood starts a lot earlier in this lifetime. It starts when they are children, but by the time they are 13, each have lives that are adult.

While reading this book, I forgot how many years pass between the two stories because not enough seems to have changed. 

I have one complaint about the book, and I'll talk about it now so I can get on to everything else that was great about it. It seemed towards the end (that's when I noticed it), we could read thoughts of other characters. I may have only notice because I've done it in my own writing before I realised (and somebody pointed it out), that I should ONLY be writing the main character's thoughts. Anything else should be through actions or words. I'm not saying we shouldn't know opinions, but the viewpoints started to shift a little. It tends to get confusing. 

I loved switching from one story to the next (between the two narrators). I loved both, and sometimes wasn't ready to jump into the other. 

This book made me hope that great things were destined for these woman. When they were hopeful, so was I. It's not a fairy tale though. It's real life. It's a life I've never seen. I never want to see it. My heart aches for those women. All of them, not just the ones in the novel. The ones who get beat up by a man, and it's somehow accepted. Scary.

It ended the only way I think it could have. Not with happily ever after, but with a little bit of hope that one life can change.

There was a sad moment that I saw coming. I don't want to say a lot about it, but I thought it had to happen to move the plot along. I don't know if that's good or bad, but I knew it would happen eventually. 

I loved this book. It made me sad, but that was only because of how real it was. 

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