I first read this in high school, which reflects very well on my high school's English department and did the book a great disservice. It was well worth revisiting not only because books are better when they aren't read begrudgingly, but because the one month of class time spent on this remains the high water mark of my exposure to Egyptian literature of any sort (there are no prominent ____ writers might be even more dangerous as illusion than reality).

It's not a pleasant book at all, likely to be expected given that the central thrust is that there is no path for women to ascend in Egyptian society while maintaining any semblance of dignity, and that any apparent awareness of this reality will trigger a sort of patriarchal defense mechanism that ends in the woman's death. It's an interesting study in revolutionary literature, as this point is set up by an overview of the main character's life that feels like it casts the broadest possible net of experience hoping desperately that it could find some resonance in enough readers to achieve a permanence that could not be so easily silenced. In that sense, the protagonist (Firdaus) is not one character but many (and her indignities not hers but the sum of her society's), and the book is not a story but a prognostication - not of a better world, but of the only way forward that might lead to it (spoiler: it's by killing literal and figurative pimps).