Zoya's Story: An Afghan Woman's Struggle for Freedom

Kabul was always more beautiful in the snow. Even the piles of rotting rubbish in my street, the only source of food for the scrawny chickens and goats that our neighbors kept outside their mud houses, looked beautiful to me after the snow had covered them in white during the long night.

Though she is only twenty-three, Zoya has witnessed and endured more tragedy and terror than most people experience in a lifetime. Born in a land ravaged by war, she was robbed of her parents when they were murdered by Muslim fundamentalists. Devastated, she fled Kabul with her grandmother and started a new life in exile in Pakistan. She joined the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), an organization that challenged the crushing edicts of the Taliban government, and she took destiny into her own hands, joining a dangerous, clandestine war to save her nation.

Direct and unsentimental, Zoya vividly brings to life the realities of growing up in a Muslim culture, the terror of living in a perpetual war zone, the pain of losing those she has loved, the horrors of a woman's life under the Taliban, and the discovered healing and transformation that lead her on a path of resistance.

Author: John Follain, Rita Cristofari
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Published: 04/15/2003
Pages: 256
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.48lbs
Size: 8.01h x 5.36w x 0.63d
ISBN: 9780060097837

Accelerated Reader:
Reading Level: 6.2
Point Value: 9
Interest Level: Upper Grade
Quiz #/Name: 71094 / Zoya's Story: An Afghan Woman's Struggle for Freedom

Award: Virginia Readers Choice Award - Nominee

About the Author
Follain, John: -

John Follain has covered Italy and the Vatican as a correspondent for the Sunday Times since 1998. He is the author of the critically acclaimed titles A Dishonoured Society: The Sicilian Mafia's Threat to Europe, Jackal: The Secret Wars of Carlos the Jackal, and Zoya's Story: An Afghan Woman's Struggle for Freedom written with Rita Cristofari and Zoya. He lives with his wife in Rome.

Cristofari, Rita: -

Rita Cristofari has worked as a press officer for the United Nations and Médecins Sans Frontières and for France 2 television.