2.5
( )

A young family's struggle to survive and maintain their dignity while being wrongfully held in a remote Moroccan desert jail for almost two decades. If you are looking for a real example of the power of human dignity when everything else has been stripped from you, look no further. ( )

A fascinating and terrify account of a young girl's life in prisons. Her family was held as political prisoners ( )

I registered this book at BookCrossing.com!
http://www.BookCrossing.com/journal/14429509

Malika Oufkir, her siblings and mother are imprisoned in Morocco for about 20 years for crimes committed by their father, who was executed. This is the story as Malika tells it, with the help of writer Michele Fitoussi.

The tale begins with Malika's childhood. Her father holds a high position in the government, is friends with the king. when the king wants to "adopt" Malika as a small child, her parents really can't say no. Apparently this kind of arrangement was not uncommon at the time: Malika remains the child of her parents but sees them only rarely. Nevertheless, she is connected to them, particularly to her mother.

Living in the various palaces through her childhood, Malika is guarded, unable to move freely. She is thus already in a prison of sorts.

When she is a young woman of 19 her father takes part in some kind of attempted coup. It fails and he is executed. The family is then restricted and soon taken to prison. They spend 20 years in various prisons, some of which allow access to relatives and provision of decent food, and unfortunately one of which is horrifyingly cruel. It is from this worst prison that the family manages to escape, through a tunnel meticulously planned and dug with tiny instruments.

I'm not giving anything away here; the dust jacket contains this information.

Clearly it's an amazing story, for a rich, pampered family to fall on such hard times and to find the strength to endure and escape. I only wish it were told better. I do not know where the problem originates - with the writer or with Malika - but the narration is flat and leaves us hanging time after time. I feel it would have been a better book if more of the details were finished - many stories just peter out - and if some of Malika's relatives were fleshed out more, as they seem to appear out of nowhere, with offhand references to how important they had been in the past. I would also have liked more detail on how the family dealt with things like the condition of their teeth after the years of neglect and lack of adequate nutrition, which are mentioned only briefly. I think such information would help us grasp better what it felt like to be in this situation, from beginning to end.

I felt that Malika tends to glorify her role here. She probably was important in the development of the escape plan and much else that helped the family hold together, yet she repeatedly tells us how great she was.

It's an important book for the story it tells. I only wish someone else had written it. ( )

The story of Malika Oufkir and her family was interesting but I didn't find the writing compelling enough. Malika, her mother, and siblings were imprisoned for 20 years following the execution of her father who attempted to assassinate the king of Morocco in 1972. To get plucked out of those pages of her early life of luxury in the palace and then on extravagant trips as a teen, into the dungeons of concealment when her entire family is taken away as if to be erased from existence is quite a hostile contrast. There were indeed moments where I felt nervous about what they had to undergo during their time in the desert jail and I was able to feel that sense of suffering and pain. However, it felt very much like reading a journal heavy on the emotion but leaving out possibly important details. Malika naturally shouldered a great deal of responsibility since she is the oldest child of her siblings, so that was to be expected. However it felt as if she was making a lot of her points from an arrogant, selfish point of view. Her family's plight to get out of jail seemed to be credited mostly to her strength and abilities to help her family cope rather than much else. Passages often contradicted one another which made it confusing to separate fact from her memory. I think this book needed stronger writing or at the very least, another once-over from an editor. The subject matter was certainly fascinating enough to have deserved this. ( )