Ratings77
Average rating4
Presents a story inspired by human love, how people take care of one another, and how choices resonate through subsequent generations. Afghanistan, 1952. Abdullah and his sister Pari live with their father and step-mother in the small village of Shadbagh. Their father, Saboor, is constantly in search of work and they struggle together through poverty and brutal winters. To Adbullah, Pari, as beautiful and sweet-natured as the fairy for which she was named, is everything. What happens to them-and the large and small manners in which it echoes through the lives of so many other people-is proof of the moral complexity of life.
This story begins in 1952 Afghanistan with two motherless siblings and moves through complex relationships and generations to the United States, Paris, and Greece, weaving a story of commitment, love, honor, and sacrifice. The plot contains violence.
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I had high hopes (or rather standards) for And The Mountains Echoed considering the undying adoration for Hosseini's first two novels. This one was really disappointing in the way that it read. My main issue was that it had too many characters; it jumped from one to another, breaking up the story and causing me to flip back through the book multiple times trying to figure out who this character now telling the story is. Hosseini broke up this story into pieces, so many pieces that I honestly don't know what story he was trying to tell anymore. It lacked in feeling and flow and made me yearn for the powerful voice I read in The Kite Runner. I won't stop reading Hosseini but I won't have such high hopes for his next book and that's what is most disappointing.
A beautiful book about the love between a brother and sister and by making one choice, the circumtances than span for more than 50 years.
This just wasn’t as good as The Kite Runner or A Thousand Splendid Suns, I’ll just say that up front. I hate saying that because those books are very good books, but this one just felt disjointed and not altogether what I was hoping for from Hosseini.
Abdullah and Pari, brother and sister, grow up in a small village in Afghanistan—at least, until their father, lured in with money by his brother, sells Pari off to a well-off family in Kabul, breaking the two apart for the rest of their lives. Apart from the very beginning and the very end, the rest of this book concerns tangential people in Afghanistan and Paris, people who have contact with either Abdullah or Pari, or people related to them, and we hear their stories unfolding alongside these two siblings. A doctor, a neighbor, a friend of the family, several generations of stories are included here, all with their own related story that we hear instead of resolving what happens to Abdullah and Pari.
It’s an interesting format, but the feel of the whole book was like a compilation of short stories more than it is a cohesive whole. Some of these short stories are written well and compelling, but others (the one involving the son of the commander comes to mind) felt rushed and incomplete. These could be entire books in their own right if given the time and the pages, but instead are condensed down into 80 or so pages each. It just made the whole thing feel fragmented. I also wasn’t quite satisfied with the resolution to the "main" Abdullah/Pari story either, because we spend so much time on other characters, I never really got to know them enough to really feel invested in what happens.
I don’t know, this was kind of a miss for me. Still a decent book, but I feel like it isn’t the author’s best work by a long shot.
Khaled Hosseini writes gripping fiction here that pulls out the import of each of the choices and actions we make. This story is far less difficult to read, graphically, than The Kite Runner and takes a different perspective than A Thousand Splendid Suns ( which is a fantastic novel). The tragedy of human relationships, mental blocks, fears, and loves are magnified through the lives of generations.
Characters are developed internally, so the reader can relate to their views, biases, hopes, and pains while still able to see the characters mistakes and misjudgments by having the bigger picture supplied by other characters.
The story is certainly a tragedy (to me) but it is beautiful and real. Read it!