Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood
In 1940, harems still abounded in Fez, Morocco. They weren't the opulent, bejeweled harems of  Scherezade, but the domestic sprawl of extended families encamped around a walled courtyard that marked  the edges of women's lives. Though born into this tightly sheltered world, Fatimi Mernissi is constantly  urged by her rebellious mother to spring beyond it. Worried that Mernissi is too shy and quiet, her mother  tells her, "You must learn to scream and protest, just the way you learned to walk and talk." InDreams of Trespass, an enjoyable weave of memory and fantasy, it is clear that Mernissi's fertile  imagination let her slip back and forth through the gates that trapped her restive mother. She spins amiable,  often improbable tales of the rigidly proper city harem in Fez and the contrasting freedoms of the country  harem where her grandmother Yakima lives. There, one of Yakima's cowives rides like the wind, another  swims like a fish, and Yakima relishes twitting the humorless first wife by naming a fat, waddling duck  after her.