Stripped to the Bone: Portraits of Syrian Women

I received this book for free through LibraryThing. I could only get into the second story and had to stop. The first story I loved but it was laborious to even get to it (since I read everything before hand). The second story was also laborious to get to but then also was too much to read. The labor is in all of the explanations and setups. If a story cannot stand alone, it is not written well. And the second story with its multiple lines, bracketed word definitions that did not seem to feed into the story, the story's flow was too interrupted. That's why people use italics and a glossary. That is poor editing. If this much poetry to setup a story is common elsewhere, it does not fit my preferred reading style. Even then, I did not see or understand fully the connections between the poetry and the stories. I expected stories not poetry.