And the Mountains Echoed

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.