When Alexandra attempts to end an abusive marriage, her husband Tareq abducts their infant daughters from their Montreal home and deposits them with his family in a primitive village in Jordan. Trying to retrieve them through legal means, Alexandra comes face to face with Arab cultures where children belong to the father's family and women have no rights to them. She puts a promising career as a medical researcher on hold, sets off alone to Jordan and succeeds in an audacious plan to smuggle her daughters back home. But upon returning to Canada, she finds a judicial system that is unable to protect her children from being kidnapped again -- this time for good, forcing her back to a life with the abusive husband. For the next twenty years, while achieving a PhD and working as a respected scientist, she submits to her husband's tyranny for the sake of her daughters. Her coping mechanism is to dissociate herself from constant verbal and emotional abuse and live as an observant stranger trapped in a life not of h

Born in Germany, Alexandra Karb grew up in Montreal. She studied science and pursued a rewarding career in medical research, but lived a personal life of trauma. This is a memoir of her twenty-year odyssey in several countries to protect her young daughters and herself from tyranny in their own home.

Alexandra Karb's profile page

Trapped is a harrowing yet enlightening true story not just of abuse, but of the consequences of fear.

Ottawa Review of Books

A tragic yet inspiring story of a mother’s sacrifice and courage to protect her children from being kidnapped by their father a second time. However the cost of her sacrifice leaves a history and present of wounds and scars that run deep for Alexandra and her daughters.

Lorinda Stewart, best selling author of One Day Closer

This true story has insights that will resonate for women readers and for men who take seriously the challenges posed by gender injustice and misogyny.

Vancouver Sun

Alexandra Karb’s story is so incredible and dramatic as to defy belief. That it actually happened will only enhance readers’ investment in this gripping, moving, and important story about a woman’s quest for autonomy, a mother’s love, and a heroine’s journey through trauma and loss into light and peace.

Priscilla Gilman, author of The Anti-Romantic Child: A Story of Unexpected Joy and The Critic’s Daughter