' MALALA YOUSAFZAI ' : NEW MEMOIR REVIEW

Taking time to be herself. Malala Yousafzai's new memoir '' FINDING MY WAY '' finds her juggling activism and married life.

MALALA YOUSAFZAI - the activist and international advocate for '' GIRLS' EDUCATION '' - became the lead of a darker storybook tale.

One morning in Mingora, Pakistan, a Taliban assassin boarded her school bus and shot her at point blank range, sending a bullet through her left eye socket and out the back of her skull.

Before the shooting, Yousafzai was a bright and ordinary girl from a pastoral valley, best known as the author of a widely circulated BBC diary about the emergence of a brutally repressive and misogynistic  regime.

After it she gave an indelible speech at the United Nations, wrote a best-selling memoir, became the youngest-ever winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and transitioned into a kind of living sainthood, all before finishing high school

As was the often case during a tumultuous few weeks in September, Malala Yousafzai's head and heart were pulling in opposite directions.

In one corner, her objection to the patriarchal bias toward marriage. In the other, her thirst for a fairy tale ending.

'' I can't believe this whole show is about getting married, '' she groused from the sofa of her hotel room, in a Manhattan skyscraper near the Hudson river. She was watching the series finale of '' The Summer I Turned Pretty,'' the hit romance drama [ based on the young adult books ] and a recent obsession.

'' Who would want to get married when they're 21?" she asked.

By the end of the episode, in which Belly, the young female protagonist resolves a will-they-or-won't they plot by declaring everlasting love in a Parisian train station, Yousafzai, 28, was striking a different tone.

'' Oh my God,'' she whimpered at a climactic kiss, with a florid Swift Taylor song swelling in the background.

'' Thank God. Very good.''

The World Students Society thanks Reggie Ugwu.