A Woman Is No Man in Busy as a Bee Books

Jul 27, 2025 Queralt✨ rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: palestine

I don’t know how to review this one without spoiling some horrifying bits. It was a tough read. A Woman Is No Man is a book about being a woman in a conservative Arab family. It’s repetitive and full of heartbreak.

The book follows two characters in different timelines: Isra, a woman taken from Palestine and forced to marry a man in the US, where she lives with his conservative mother. She doesn’t speak English, isn’t allowed to work, is beaten by her husband, and has four daughters but fails to I don’t know how to review this one without spoiling some horrifying bits. It was a tough read. A Woman Is No Man is a book about being a woman in a conservative Arab family. It’s repetitive and full of heartbreak.

The book follows two characters in different timelines: Isra, a woman taken from Palestine and forced to marry a man in the US, where she lives with his conservative mother. She doesn’t speak English, isn’t allowed to work, is beaten by her husband, and has four daughters but fails to give him a son. She craves being loved, if not by her husband, by herself. She only finds peace when reading. Then there’s Deya, Isra’s 18-year-old daughter, who’s angry about the restrictions she’s expected to endure. She wants to go to university and work, but instead, she’s being forced to marry and told she’ll have to be a housewife. The book covers generational trauma, cycles of abuse, cultural expectations, patriarchy, and the shame of being silent when you have no agency as a woman.

I was frustrated throughout the book, which I think was the point. I felt, like the characters, that they had no choice but to accept all this shit. That’s why I loved the chapter where Deya is vocally angry at her mother for not doing more for her. In that scene, she’s told: if you speak English and have a high school degree and still think you have no options, why do you expect your mother, who didn’t know the language or have anything of her own, to have had any chance to do better? That reality check hit hard. It was meant to show that everyone has a choice, but for me, there was a before and after that conversation. I read the rest of the book differently because it went from covering the cycles of abuse to wanting to breaking/resisting them.

Mostly because of a line that went something like, “Aren’t your dreams worth a beating or two?” Considering Isra’s story, it was pretty… dark.

At first, I found Isra’s chapters difficult and Deya’s annoying. But after that chapter, I appreciated both, no matter how hard they were to read. I also liked that the book didn’t portray Isra’s husband as an awful person just for the sake of it. It showed us how he went from a decent man to an unhappy bastard. His mom, though, was a sour bitch, and I refuse to understand why she was like that. Every time something bad happened she was like “he was possessed” or “it was a djinn.” Maybe you’re a disgusting human being with a collapsing brain, ever thought of that? Ugh.

Anyways every single character in this book needed therapy and antidepressants. ...more

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Jul 19, 2019 Deanne Townsend rated it it was amazing

This is such a powerful book. It is tragic, empowering, educational, thought-provoking, and hopeful all at the same time.

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Feb 28, 2020 Wendy Johnson rated it it was amazing

What an emotional rollercoaster! This story of three generations of conservative Arab women, is heartbreaking, frustrating and at times hopeful. While they are different and unique in their personalities, 18-year old Deya, her mother Isra, and grandmother Fareeda, have one thing in common. They are struggling against a culture where they are raised to believe there are no other choices, that a woman is less than a man.

Telling this story from the three women’s points of view, this story pulled a ...more

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