Sasson, author of Princess: A True Story of Life behind the Veil in Saudi Arabia (1992) and Ayada: Daughter of Iraq (2003), focuses on the story of Joanna Al-Askari Hussain, a Kurdish woman living in Iraq, to tell the broader story of ethnic tensions between the Kurds, Iraqis, Turks, Iranians, and Syrians. Written in the first person, Joanna's story covers her romance with a Kurdish freedom fighter, marriage, and taking up the struggle against the Iraqis herself. She recalls times of raining dead and injured birds after a missile attack and of a desperate flight after her village was attacked by Saddam Hussein's forces in 1987. Some 200,000 of her fellow Kurds were killed in a genocide campaign. Photographs and personal recollections--a wedding without the groom, a husband who hogs the covers, the adjustments of a pampered woman to a life of privation and personal demands--offer a very human look at the struggle of the Kurds in Iraq and one woman's heroism.
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