An author friend decided they didn’t want to blog about the upcoming Becoming Terran, because they were uncomfortable from the beginning.
From what they said, I don’t think they understood what was going through the PoV character’s head on page 1.
Let me start by saying that I really do not like, and have no interest, in horror stories. I’m not into reading about young people getting slaughtered because they’re not virgins, or zombies. There’s too much of that in the real world, right now.
Before anyone argues, I suggest you look up “Islamic State” on wikipedia, and go down the rabbit hole of links, esp. the one about the genocide of the Yazidis.
Now that you understand that… what’s going through Francoise’ head, before she does her thing, is this: if she and her sister are “lucky”, they and the other women from the hotel will be given to the troops for their enjoyment. If they really “lucky”, one of the troops will “marry” them. The alternative is that the rebel troops, not trusting their loyalty, will simply machine gun everyone, and not check to see if they’re dead before using a bulldozer to dump them into a mass grave.
By doing what she does, she had effectively saved all the people from the hotel.