A Woman Is No Man

In 1990, seventeen-year-old Isra is married off in Palestine and brought to Brooklyn, where she lives under the thumb of her domineering mother-in-law Fareeda and a husband she barely knows. The pressure intensifies when Isra bears four daughters instead of the sons Fareeda demands. In 2008, Isra's oldest daughter Deya, raised to believe her parents died in a car accident, is being pressured into the same kind of arranged marriage she dreads. A secret note from a familiar-looking woman pushes Deya to dig into her family's past, where she uncovers the truth about her mother and the cycle of silence and violence that has bound three generations of Palestinian women.