Honestly, I expected more from this book.
I was expecting to read a memoir but a lot of it reads more like a history textbook. I was more interested in the story of Mayada, which the book claims to be about, but a good 75% of the book was just the history of Iraq and the Ottoman empire. Pages upon pages of painstaking details and just story upon story of Mayada's aristocratic privileged life as the daughter of so and so and the grandaughter of so and so and the descendent of.... It was honestly just difficult to get through a lot of it.
The parts about the shadow women in cell 52 and the time she spent in prison were well written and also difficult to read (but for an entirely different reason).
By the time I got about halfway I found that I was actually forcing myself to finish it because I wanted to know how she ended up getting out.