“For eighteen years, my unibrow has saved me from being sold into a painful, terrifying death,” Xiran Jay Zhao writes in their debut novel, “Iron Widow.”

“Iron Widow” is not for the faint of heart.

A story about a thirst for vengeance and hunger for power, brimming with the pain caused by a deeply misogynistic society, the novel is for angry girls — the girls who have been beaten down and poked just enough to snap. For anyone who is aching to break out of the claustrophobic boxes that make up our world — “Iron Widow” is a novel of catharsis, or as the endorsement quote on the cover from E.K. Johnston states, “A primal scream of a book.”