Cultural cruelty
This book and this author slowly reveal to the reader an understanding of what is expected of a young female (in her culture in Turkey). Not a mere recitation or report of a single incident, but a gradual awareness of life's meanness. He writes with sensitivity and delicacy, but does not shrink from telling of Meryem's gradual awareness and her belief that she must be evil and unloved and she thereby learns to endure. Yet, we are saved from despair by an ending which seem not real to me, a fairy tale ending. but does make closing the book more palatable.
