Amazon.com Review
Girls can be married off as soon as they mature--as early as 9 according to religious edict--though there are fewer child brides and child mothers as modernization tinkers with village traditions. Since 1992, the politics of overpopulation have made birth control a national priority, a sea change embraced by many married women worn down by childbearing. "Only husbands and old women want us to have many children," says a mother of eight, "men because they don't know what a trouble it is and old women because they have forgotten." Ethnographer Erika Friedl writes somewhat judgmentally on the hardscrabble lives led in Deh Koh, but also with insight, verve, and authority. While spotlighting the children, she illuminates the days of their mothers and fathers and opens the reader's biases for question, too. --Francesca Coltrera
