Since Ayaan is only two when her father is taken away, she has little memory of him. She spends her childhood picturing him and hating Afwayne or Big Mouth, Somalian president, Siad Barre, who put her father in jail. Afwayne’s special police often burst into people’s houses and take their parents away.

Unlike the characters of grandmother’s fairy tales, Afwayne is “a real monster” (19). Ayaan reflects that Barre, the vice commander of Somalia’s troops at the time of the country’s independence, staged a coup in the late 1960s to become president himself. He established a government rooted in the classic Soviet style, with a single party and single trade union.

Asha is allowed to visit Hirsi in prison, but takes along only Mahad, the son. The family pray to Allah each night for Hirsi’s return. Ayaan’s concept of God remains nebulous. One day she watches Ayeeyo prostrating herself in prayer, and circles her, thinking Ayeeyo is playing some kind of a game with her. Ayeeyo rises and yells at Ayaan, cursing her, till an older cousin rescues her. The cousin tells Ayaan that grandmother had been talking to Allah, a private and sacred act which must not be disturbed. Ayaan realizes Allah is real for her grandmother. She tells her cousin she hasn’t experienced God that way; the cousin explains that she too will feel Allah’s presence when she grows up.

Meanwhile, the family is short of resources, with Asha often travelling outside Mogadishu with one of her father’s cousins to receive contraband food and supplies. When Asha is around, the children follow a routine, eating breakfast and lunch on time, but when she is away, they are neglected and “behav[e] abominably” (24).

Soon, Asha moves the family to the village of Matabaan, hoping exposure to the countryside may reform her children. Ayaan and Mahad fight bitterly, with Mahad tempting Ayaan to look down an open latrine and then pushing her into it. Ayaan returns the favor. As the children are scolded by the grown-ups, Ayaan reflects that she is blamed for taking Mahad’s bait, even though he is the instigator.

The family moves back to Mogadishu, as abruptly as they moved out. Mahad is enrolled in school. Ayaan and Haweya torment their grandmother so much with their pranks that it is decided Ayaan will attend both public school and Quran school, or the madrassah.

At the madrassah, one of the eight-year-old girls is bullied for being “kintirleey, ‘she with the clitoris’” (30). Ayaan does not know what that means or why the other children call the girl “dirty” and spit in her face. Soon after she joins the madrassah, Ayaan learns Ayeeyo has arranged circumcision ceremonies for her grandchildren. The ceremonies take place while Asha is away. Ayaan knows Hirsi is against the circumcision of girls, believing it an un-Islamic practice, but in Somali culture almost all girls undergo what is now considered female genital mutilation. In this practice, a girl’s clitoris and labia are cut or scraped away to make her supposedly “pure,” and the wound stitched tightly to make a chastity belt out of scar tissue, only a small opening left to pass urine. The band of flesh is only opened by force, during sex, typically after a girl’s marriage.

Ayaan recalls the festive atmosphere at home when the ceremony takes place, the house filled with relatives and food. Mahad is circumcised, followed by Ayaan, as women hold her down and a man coaxes her clitoris out of its hood and snips it with scissors. An indescribable pain seizes Ayaan, and she can recall little of what happened after, except that Haweya screamed for hours when her genitals were mutilated. Haweya’s recovery is slower than Ayaan’s, as she develops a fever and loses weight. When Asha returns from her trip, she is furious about the ceremony, but her mother tells her that without the ritual, her daughters would be shamed.

Meanwhile, Hirsi escapes from prison and gets to Adis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, where he forms the Somali Salvation Democratic Front (SSDF) along with other Somali exiles to oppose Siad Barre’s rule. Ethiopia and Somalia—Christian and Muslim—are ancient enemies, involved in yet another war with each other. Ethiopian President Mengistu, “a dictator every bit as cruel as Siad Barré” (36) funds the SSDF to bolster Barré’s enemies. Asha starts leaving for longer trips in this period; the children do not know it yet, but she is meeting Hirsi in Jeddah in Saudi Arabia.

Ayaan’s parents are forced to meet in Jeddah as a raging war makes travel impossible between Mogadishu and Adis Ababa. Asha manages to convince Hirsi to move to Jeddah so the family can be reunited; she prefers Muslim Saudi Arabia to Ethiopia, land of the unbelievers. When Ayaan is eight, Asha manages fake passports for the family and flies to Jeddah with the children. However, when Asha and the children arrive in Jeddah, Hirsi, called away on mysterious business, is not there to receive them at the airport. Asha is stranded, since in Saudi Arabia women cannot go anywhere unaccompanied by a man. The Saudi immigration officer refuses to let the family out till a man comes to fetch them. It is nighttime when a clansman helps her and takes the family to his home in Jeddah.

Over the next couple of days, the children go out on the streets of Jeddah, astounded to see women in abaya (full-body robes)—full coverage is not the norm in Somalia. Ayaan confesses that she and her siblings point at the women rudely. When word arrives from members of Asha’s clan that Hirsi has gone to Ethiopia and may be there for months, Asha grows enraged. The clan-members help the family shift to a rundown place in Mecca, where the children wither in the heat, but enjoy the colorful markets.

In Somalia, the family had been Muslim, but quite relaxed in their practices. In Mecca, Asha insists the children pray five times a day and enrolls them in Quran school. Unlike Somalia, where the schools were mixed, Mecca schools are segregated by gender. Ayaan feels oppressed in Mecca, where her schoolmates call her “abid” or enslaved person. For the first time in her life, Ayaan realizes she is Black.

Unexpectedly, Hirsi turns up in Mecca one day. Ayaan calls him “Abeh” and is overjoyed to see he looks like her, with his round forehead and high cheekbones. Hirsi’s arrival lightens the atmosphere in the house. He allows Haweya and Ayaan to join him on the prayer mats, even though this is against the rules, and encourages the children to ask questions. Ayaan notes, “after my father arrived back in my life, I opened up the way a cactus blooms after rain” (45).

Soon, the family moves to a bigger house in Riyadh. Ayaan notes that in Saudi Arabia, people blame the Jewish people for everything, including the air-conditioning breaking down. Despite their bigotry, the Saudis can be extraordinarily kind, as Ayaan experiences on many occasions.

At home, the relationship between Hirsi and Asha is in trouble. Asha feels confined by the rules against women in Saudi Arabia, especially those forbidding women to go out unaccompanied, but does not blame the system for the oppression. Instead, she wants Hirsi to perform all the outside chores or accompany her, something which Hirsi despises. Ayaan and Haweya tell Hirsi they do not want to be girls, as being a girl is very difficult. Hirsi himself rages against the segregation laws in Saudi Arabia, as they can never travel together by public transport as a family—the women take one bus, and the men another.

Hirsi’s liberal attitudes coexist with the expectation that the housework is the domain of the women. He often has dozens of guests over for his political meetings, the washing-up falling to Asha, Ayaan, and Haweya. One day in 1979, Hirsi brings news that the family are being deported from Saudi Arabia in 24 hours. Asha blames Hirsi for the family’s predicament, since he is open with his secrets and political affiliations.

Much against Asha’s wishes, the family moves to Ethiopia, where Hirsi’s SSDF is attracting many volunteers. Hirsi is an important man in Ethiopia, assigned a mansion that once belonged to a government dignitary. Ethiopia has seen much turmoil in the 1970s, with Somalian President Barre invading the Ogaden region dominated by Somali speakers. The Ethiopian revolutionaries asked for Soviet help; the Soviets abandoned Barre to back Ethiopia. Barre’s forces retreated, and the Ethiopians gave aid to those opposing Barre, including the SSDF. In 1978, the day Asha and her children left Somalia for Jeddah, a coup against Barre was foiled.

The SSDF has an army and an airbase by the time Hirsi and his family relocate to Ethiopia. Asha finds the Ethiopians “primitive,” especially since they are kufr or non-believers. Eventually, the family moves to a military compound, where officers visit in the evenings, Asha happily making chapatis and stew for them, and the group reciting poetry. Asha, who writes poems herself, enjoys these evenings, visibly softening before her children.

In time, Asha begins to resent the fact that some of the men expect her to make tea for them and clean up after them. She also hates the fact that her girls are growing up in an all-male enclave, and fears for their safety. After a year in Ethiopia, Hirsi comes around to Asha’s point of view and decides to relocate to Kenya. Asha gets pregnant and has a stillbirth, a boy.

Ayaan reflects that she had seen three failed regimes by the time she was 10, whether it was the police state in Mogadishu, the oppressive state in Saudi Arabia that treated half its citizens as inferior, or the old Somali rule of the clan which led to internecine violence.

The family moves to Nairobi in Kenya in 1980. Never a very affectionate parent, Asha becomes even harsher towards her children, particularly her daughters, after the move to Kenya, often thrashing them after tying up their arms and legs so they cannot struggle. Their grandmother moves in with the family, as suspicious of the Kenyans as Asha. The older women call the darker-skinned Kenyans “abid” or enslaved person, much as the Saudi Arabians had termed them.

Hirsi likes Kenya because it is a relatively wealthy country that has granted him political asylum. It is also convenient since he can leave his family in the care of the city’s prominent Osman Mahmud clansmen—one of the largest Somali tribes, under whose umbrella both Hirsi and Asha fall—during his frequent travels. Asha is unhappy with Hirsi’s arrangements, as she expects her husband to live with her in Nairobi.

Against Asha’s wishes, Hirsi enrolls their daughters in an English-language school, the Juja Road Primary School, “clearly modeled on British colonial schools” (64), with daily morning assemblies and prefects. Ayaan, who has had sporadic formal education so far, finds school difficult, struggling with Math and the Swahili-language requirement. However, as she picks up English, Ayaan discovers a great interest in books, devouring with Haweya the Nancy Drew series and the works of Enid Blyton.

At home, Asha forces them to study the Quran with a strict ma’alim who beats Ayaan so hard one day he cracks her skull. Asha does not pay heed to Ayaan’s visible injuries, tying her up to give her another beating. Only when a visitor notices Ayaan’s swollen head and bruised skin is Ayaan taken to the hospital. She needs an emergency operation to remove the blood that has pooled between her skull and her skin. Ayaan notes that Asha is remorseful after the incident, confessing her great love for Ayaan. The beatings stop for a long time after this incident.

The relationship between their parents sours further, with Hirsi away from home for great stretches. Sometimes he stays away for so long, Ayaan thinks he will never return. When Ayaan turns 14, her mother moves her to the Muslim Girls’ Secondary School, which despite its name, also has a significant number of Christian students. Ayaan notices the multicultural crowd at her new school, with many students from the Arab Peninsula and South Asia. Every group has its own complex social hierarchies, like the caste system with the Indians. The world seems complex and fragmented to Ayaan.

Ayaan gets her first period without having been told about the menstrual cycle. She fears her belly is being torn from within when help arrives from unexpected quarters in the form of Mahad. It is Mahad who tells her she is having her period and gives her money to buy sanitary napkins.

As Ayaan turns 16, she gets a new Islamic studies teacher in the form of the Saudi Sister Aziza, beautiful, pious, and fully veiled. Deeply influenced by Sister Aziza, Ayaan takes to practicing Islam more seriously and wearing the Abaya. Despite her keen awareness of sin and the importance of female chastity, Ayaan cannot help feeling a sense of yearning when she reads love stories. Ayaan develops sexual awareness and soon finds herself attracted to her brother’s friend, Yusuf, who goes by “Ken.” She and Yusuf grow close, kissing in secret.