"The Underground Girls of Kabul features several women who find ways to resist and subvert power. Which woman's story did you find most interesting? Why?

"The Underground Girls of Kabul" features several women who find ways to resist and subvert power—including Azita, whose status is elevated by disguising her daughter as a son; Mehran, who is able to confidently roughhouse with boys her own age; and Zahra, who fights her parents to maintain her male identity after puberty. Which woman's story did you find most interesting? Why?

All of the stories were fascinating. Each women really had a story to tell. How they were born girls, lived as boys and returned (or not) to the life of a girl. The emotions they felt, the confusion they must have lived through. Even the women that did return and marry, were still psychologically scarred, questioning themselves and there feelings. I found Azita's story to be the most interesting. Yes her status was elevated, but she was mistreated by her father and her husband. As her children grew even they questioned her actions. In thinking she could somehow change and educate her people, she jeopardized herself and her children's futures.

I found Azita' s story the most interesting; her life seemed so full of contradictions. On one hand she was in parliament, a place of some influence, and very unusual for a woman in that society. She is well educated, another rarity there. Yet, she is still under her husband's control, and not respected in her own household. I found it sad that she was expected to feed and entertain all the many people that called on her late into the evening after working hard all day.

Azita..... Her story was saddest because she had had such dreams for change and all was for naught...

All the women's stories were important and interesting. Yes, Azita's story seemed to be the one of main focus in the book as we keep going back to what is happening in her life throughout the book. She symbolizes a little of every woman's story all wrapped up in her family situation. She comes from a poor and uneducated background to succeed better than most women and then to have it all taken away from her and have to return to the subjugation by men in her culture once again. She seemed so close and then at the end so far from gaining what all women of Afghanistan were trying to get. I was particularly fascinated with the story of Shukur/Shukria who remained a male longer than most and then was immediately married. Her role as a wife and mother returned her to the suppression of males except that she was a professional working outside the house and the contrasts for her were more extreme. It was amusing how she had to learn to be a female and try to copy the voice and mannerisms that she had so little experience with.

I think I was drawn more to Shahed's story. But they were all very interesting -- and brave.

.

I found Azita's story to be most compelling. She clearly is a competent, intelligent woman, who has overcome many obstacles in her past to attain a somewhat elevated status as a parliamentarian (and mother of a "son"), but she struggles to be taken seriously and to be heard by the socially-favored gender, men who are often beneath her both intellectually and in accomplishments, and yet are unwilling to treat her with the respect she deserves.

Shukria's story was the most touching for me. She revels in her motherhood and points to those feelings for justification of her gender. Shukria, however, struggles in her sexual relations with her husband based on her years growing up as a bacha posh. "My whole body reacts negatively." The marriage ultimately fails ("Talaq. Talaq. Talaq.") and now Shukria lives only with her three children - a "dismissed woman" with an absent husband in the eyes of Afghan society. Although Shukria works full-time as a nurse and is studying to become a doctor, I wonder if she will ever experience the joy of an intimate relationship.

Azita was the most interesting to me. I found her both courageous and perplexingly timid. I was horrified that her father who seemed to support her aspirations would then marry her off to an ignorant man and condemn her to a suffocating life where she is looked down upon for her intelligence and attainments. I was also surprised that she would raise one of her won daughters as a bacha posh. It was depressing to realize that her situation was not unusual. Many women in patriarchal societies are similarly restricted. What a waste.