This book has been gathering dustbin my shelf for too long. Now it was time to pick it up and read it. And now that I have finished, I'm a little disappointed.
I had gathered from the information on the back of the book that it was a story about the author's life (untill the moment of writing). But ultimately it was 'only' about her childhood and years at school and university.
The story didn't really fascinate me either. To me it was like it was written from a distance, almost businesslike. Repeating sentences didn't make it any better, either.
All in all interesting, but certainly not a great book. ( )

I stumbled across this brief and somewhat bitter autobiography more than a decade ago, while looking for books about women in modern-day Iran. This was long before the world had heard of Marjane Satrapi or Shirin Ebadi.

Born to a poor family in a Kurdish village in Iran, Kordi lost her eyesight at the young age of three, a development that only added to the challenges she faced growing up female in a male-dominated culture. The narrator's troubled relationship with her mother; her almost-miraculous removal to a school for the blind run by English missionaries; her tragic history of abuse at the hands of one of her teachers once there; and her tenure as the first blind student (male or female) to attend the University of Tehran; are all set out in this short memoir.

I recall being impressed, not only with the litany of suffering contained in Kordi's life story, but by the complete absence of that peculiar kind of sensationalism that sometimes characterizes "traumatic memoirs" here in the United States. Recommended to anyone researching the position of women or the disabled in Iran, or anyone who likes to read biographies of less-than-famous individuals. ( )