Joyfully painful reading

This is the first book I have read by Alice Walker (though I know she did The Color Purple), and it definitely won't be my last.

The narrative is told in an imaginative, and at times painful manner. Themes such as revenge, immigration, lack of communication between generations, and others are called to focus through the subject are of female circumcision. Our key heroine in on trial for her life as she has killed the woman who gave her sister a circumcision, which resulted in the death of her sister.

The style that the narrative is written in, which is essentially a group of monologues that go back and forth through time, compells you to experience the same emotions the characters are. Since it gets rather graphic at times about the physical effects on these women, it can be hard to read. In fact, what is even tougher to swallow is that women helped to torture other women for the sake of ritual without thinking twice.

Our main heroine can be hard to follow at times as her name is divided between the name given to her in her home country and the one which she took on when coming to the United States. The rest of the characters are secondary, but no less vital to the story as they have been effected or had a part in the main character's life. Whether you believe in revenge or not, you can't help but find some small sympathy for this woman, who watched her sister die after being tortured by the very people who are supposed to guide their future.

The "secret" is revealed in the end to be the ability to resist. Though the main character dies in the end, she has definitely done her share of resisting the cultural environments that provoked her to commit murder (the reason she is put to death) and through her actions there is hope that the women she has encountered will learn and spread some of this hope and ability to fight for what you believe in, even when you are fighting the foundations of the society in which you live.

What I also appreciated about this book is that all of the characters are very human, they all have their inconsistencies, and nobody grows into a perfect being at the end of the book. I could also conceivably see myself acting as she did if I were in that situation, and I don't believe in revenge.

Alice Walker also have an extremely articulate prologue at the end of the book, written in the form of a letter to the reader, which isn't so much a charity plea as it is trying to reveal the truth about what happens in the world without getting preachy. Female circumcision does still occur in some cultures today, and though this is a fictional work, it is an intelligent depiction of what can happen to the psychology of a woman who undergoes its process.