The primary differentiator of the book is not the story, but the writing style that Mohsin Hamid employs. The narrator writes in second-person, so “you” are technically in the story, living his life through his eyes. So, it is like “you” fall in love with the “pretty girl” and do XYZ everything that the narrator does.
The primary argument of the book is simple: a woman must have financial independence (specifically, 500 pounds/year) and a private space if she wants to become a writer (by extension, this extends to other fields as well).
The most popular sister remains Jo because of her courage and her radical tomboyishness breaking gender roles. Followed by Jo, the next most loved in line is Beth. She is good-natured and sweet, but is often frail in her health. Meg is the eldest sister with conventional familial values and Amy is the youngest and the most spoiled.
Silent grief descends on finishing The Diary of A Young Girl. How do you do this book justice? What if Anne had lived? Can you even review a 13-year old’s work that she didn’t mean to publish, an innocent child that died in the Holocaust? What would she have become? I honestly don’t know.
I once read that a classic is a book that has never finished what it wants to say. Jane Eyre is that kind of classic. When I first read this book at 14 or 15, I thought of it as just a love story set in the backdrop of Victorian England. But I reread it during the lockdown last year and found so many themes I had missed the last time.