As I already said on forum, I started reading it after Marjane's recent death, mostly because I wasn't familiar with her work and I saw that there are A LOT of opposing opinions on it. My conclusion is that no one is normal about this memoir, literacy is in trenches and we need to open the schools immediately. Most of misunderstanding seems to come from the fact that people are forgeting this is a memoir, not a history textbook, for the good part written from a perspective of a child that lived through awful violence that no adult would be prepared to endure. I don't know if there are some things that are not true in this book, but most of the information that we get about the historical happenings is told by some other person to Marjane. I feel like that is a clue for itself that maybe some things are to be taken with a grain of salt, because in the time of wars of this scale people sometimes do spread fake informations and they can falsely asume something out of fear. Many times it is said in the book that it was very hard to be informed because of media control by the government. So all that's left basically is just firsthand experience, but in this case that experience is vast. Every faulty thing that she's done (and she has indeed done some faulty things), she's done out of fear and she was immediately corrected by people around her, mostly her family. I seriously cannot understand how someone can say that this book is favorable towards western world, when she so honestly depicted how detached from it she felt in Austria? Or that the book is a bad representation of Iranian women, when her mother and grandmother are such inspirational female characters, depicted so beautifully that I personally would feel a sense of enormous personal achievement if my daughter one day painted such picture about me. All in all, may this wonderfull brave artist rest in piece and may her work continue to be an inspiration to all the fighters for freedom around the world. I might try her grandma's method for firm breasts, what the hell, sure.