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Okay so I loved this book, my second five-star fiction read of 2021! The novel follows two alternating timelines within the same Palestinian-Arab family: Isra, when she first leaves Palestine to marry into Adam’s family and live in the United States, and eighteen-year-old Deya, who lives in Brooklyn and learned at a young age that her mother Isra and her father Adam both died in a car accident. Deya begins to question this narrative about her parents when she receives a secret note from a mysterious yet familiar-looking woman, which leads Deya to also interrogate all she knows about her place in the world as a young woman, expected to marry a man and raise his children, who wants to go to college and yet is forbidden to do so.

I felt enamored with how Etaf Rum writes about gender in A Woman is No Man. She portrays more explicit forms of patriarchy for sure, such as how Isra and other women are relentlessly pressured into only existing to support their husbands and raise their husband’s children. Rum also displays more nuanced manifestations of patriarchy, such as how Fareeda, Isra’s step-mother and Deya’s grandmother, internalizes this sexism and perpetuates it to disempower all of the other women in her life. I appreciated how Rum portrayed the deleterious effects of toxic masculinity too, how the pressure inflicted upon Adam contributed to his horrifying abuse of Isra. While I agree with other reviewers that sometimes Rum’s writing felt a bit repetitive or stilted, such as the initial conversations between Deya and the mysterious woman in her life, the characters�� emotions still felt genuine. I also liked how Rum included details about how Zionism �� which the United States is complicit in through providing billions of dollars to Israel in military aid �� generated the intergenerational trauma that affects Fareeda, Isra, and other members of their family.

Despite this book’s vivid and brutal depiction of domestic abuse and stifling gender roles, I felt great hope when reading about how certain female characters did their best to fight back against their circumstances and reclaim their lives. I loved reading about Isra, Sarah, and Deya and how these women supported one another’s dreams even when other women tried to tear them down. Rum’s emphasis on the theme of books, knowledge, and education as empowerment both materially and psychologically resonated with me and made me feel once again grateful for the ability to access social justice and feminist texts.

The pacing of this book enhanced my reading experience of it too. Rum inserts just the right amount of suspense into the alternating timelines between Isra and Deya to keep us on our toes. I liked how she set scenes and how she wrote about characters�� internal suffering, such as how she humanized Fareeda despite her cruelty toward Isra.

Overall an excellent book that I would recommend to anyone interested in fiction about gender and family. I think I read this one at the right time for me because I’ve been feeling pretty hopeless about how white supremacy, amatonormativity, and patriarchy have been affecting my own life, and Rum reminded me of the power I wield in my own individual choices even when it feels like these systems of oppression are so entrenched (of course I recognize the difference between my privileged circumstances and those of the characters in this novel.) Yay for novels that feel both bleak and hopeful, that feature characters with strong voices doing their best to survive and care for others even in awful conditions.