The Favored Daughter: One Woman’s Fight to Lead Afghanistan into the Future

Koofi, Afghanistan’s first female parliament deputy speaker, tells her heartbreaking life story and, through the letters she writes to her two daughters, shares her hopes for their future, which are interspersed throughout the book. The unwanted 19th daughter of an MP of Badakhshan—one of the country’s poorest, wildest, and most remote provinces—Koofi learns early on how difficult it is to be female in Afghanistan’s patriarchal society, where wives of poor rural farmers are considered less valuable than the goats they tend. She grows up among her extended family (until her father’s assassination in 1978 results in her eventually moving to Kabul with her mother and becoming the first girl in her family to attend school). Set against Afghanistan’s war-torn history—the invasion of the Soviets, the mujahedeen’s civil war, the brutality of the Taliban—Koofi’s amazing life reveals itself in a series of candid chapters. Coming of age as the Taliban takes control, she’s forced to interrupt her medical studies and witness her country’s regression to the “Dark Ages.” She flees to her native province, eventually becoming an MP in Hamid Karzai’s new government, where she represents the same people her father did. Highlighting the resilience, values, and culture of the Afghan people, this moving narrative provides an evocative portrait of a battered country as it pleads with the world’s powers not to abandon the fight and risk the government’s fragile stability. (Jan.)