I have been trying to read more Pakistani authors lately because I genuinely want to support our own literature and find stories that feel close to home. Safinah Danish Elahi is a famous name, so naturally I picked up Eye on the Prize with high expectations. I thought I would at least get something thoughtful, layered, or emotionally engaging. Instead, the only thing I gained was the painful realization that I had wasted my time.

This book is short, and that ended up being the most “positive” thing about it (bcuz I could finish it in a day lol). The writing is unbelievably rushed, though. There is no atmosphere, no world-building, no descriptive richness. Important themes are mentioned but never explored, which was honestly frustrating.

The main characters , Shezray, Minahil, and Hina, are, frankly, insufferable. Not because they are flawed women (flawed characters can be the best), but because they are written with such a shallow understanding of human emotion. They feel like cardboard cut-outs of elite Pakistani women, reduced to stereotypes we’ve seen a thousand times in Pakistani dramas. There is no nuance, no depth, no emotional journey. Just predictable beats and overused tropes.

And the POV switching was so abrupt and confusing at times???? Instead of feeling like a proper novel, it read like a draft for a Pakistani drama script tbh.

Also, this book tried to examine the pressures of elite society, motherhood, ambition, and the cost of keeping up appearance, but it literally gives absolutely nothing meaningful to the reader. The themes are touched so lightly they may as well not exist. There is no emotional weight to any revelation, no internal conflict that feels earned, and no interaction that feels authentic. It’s all gloss, no substance.

By the time I finished it, I was literally asking myself: What was the point of this story? Why was it even written? And that is the worst question a reader can be left with.

I honestly wasn't expecting it to hit me this hard before I started reading, but this book is brilliant. It’s a short book, more like a long essay, but somehow it carries a weight that’s still heavy almost a hundred years later. Woolf wrote it in 1929, and yet it feels like she could’ve written it last month.

She talks about how, for a woman to write, she needs money and a room of her own. At first, it sounds so literal. But the more I read, the more I realized she was talking about something deeper, and that is, space. Not just physical space, but mental space. Emotional space. Space to breathe, think, dream, and create without being pulled in a thousand directions.

And it honestly made me wonder how many women never got that space? How many books were never written because the writer was busy surviving, taking care of others, or simply denied the right to think?

Woolf keeps returning to this image of a woman locked out of libraries, denied education, dismissed in literary circles. And even now, that feeling hasn’t fully gone away. Women still have to fight harder to be taken seriously. We still feel guilty for wanting quiet, wanting time, wanting something for ourselves.

Because even now, women are writing, and yet we’re still boxed in. We still hear: “Oh women only write emotional stories.” “Oh women’s books aren’t serious literature.” It’s so wild how people still act like women’s writing is small. Like our stories don’t matter unless they fit some narrow, approved version of “important.” But look around. Women are writing EVERYTHING. Women are writing about war, grief, colonialism, identity, displacement, rage, joy, love, trauma, silence, and yes, romance too.

Reading Woolf made me see it clearly that even if we have the room now, only some of us, anyway, but we’re still fighting for the respect that should come with it. Women are writing with fire, with tenderness, with intellect, with rage, with imagination and still, the world squints at us like we’re only half real. So yes, Woolf was right: women need space, but we also need recognition. We need our words to be seen as full and not just decorative.