Ms. Rodriguez's attempts to teach Afghan women new styling skills in a country where she does not speak the language nor understand the culture was courageous and in some ways foolhardy! Her examples of situations she found herself in, from her involvement in the wedding night ritual to her own ill-thought out marriage and association with the "mafia next door," was so descriptive that I found myself wishing she'd just get out of there!

I do recommend this book. Ms. Rodriguez's writing style makes it easy to visualize the hardships Afghan women suffer and their means of escaping their own reality for short periods. Her attempts to help them improve their situations by giving them an accepted profession is admirable.

But Ms. Rodriguez's escape from her own American reality puzzles and disturbs me. She doesn't go into how it felt to leave her sons behind and makes little reference to them thoughout the book. Revealing more of herself and her feelings toward the family left behind may have made me appreciate her more as a person than I did.