While I believe that this is an important read since it gives an unflinching view of the Iraq war from the Iraqi side by a Lebanese female journalist (how many civilians were killed rather than the actual targets, how many widows and widowers we made instead of ridding the world of terrorists, and how many children had to pay the price for this war), there wasn't a good balance between that and the author's story of her infertility and how desperately she and her husband wanted to have kids.

I do understand that the reason why Zahra and Hawra played such a huge part of her life was because of her infertility story and I don't wish to come across as unsympathetic, but the infertility part of the book dragged for me and I ended up skipping through some pages of it.

(I just re-read that and it makes me sound very unsympathetic...as someone who has no interest in having her own children and would rather adopt, I had a hard time relating to Jaber's desperate need to spend years and money on fertility options. That's why I skipped through those parts...)

However, all in all, a very good and powerful book. ( )

Autobiographical novel about Hala Jaber, a War Journalist, originally from Beirut but resident and married in England, posted in Irak who deals with the impossibility of bearing children.
Her life changes when she meets Zahra, a three year-old child who has been badly burned by a bomb which has left her parentless along with her baby sister Hawra.
Hala lets these sisters drive her feelings and she embarks on a journey with no return.

I thought the novel engaging in the sense that you could connect as a woman with Hala's need to become a mother and at the same time, understand her response to children ravaged by war who are left with no one in the world.

But at the same time, I couldn't help but feeling a bit critical about the recollection of war, as it's told by a journalist who works for an English newspaper, which used terrible stories of damaged children to engage more readers (to rise funds BUT who, of course, also bought more newspapers...).
So let me have the benefit of the doubt about the whole recollection. ( )