Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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19 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
Impressive, poignant and unputdownable, 29 April 2008
It's a long time since a book made me feel angry and want to jump into the pages to defend the characters but that's how this novel made me feel. I found it a really gripping read with depth and realism that made me reluctant to put it down.
I confess to knowing very little about Afghanistan and whilst I'm certainly no expert now, I do feel I have much more of a flavour of the country and it's people. It's easy for me to be indignant and say what I would do in certain situations but in reality, and as this novel shows, there are so many factors that go into making decisions that are life changing. Frustrated as I felt at times at the unfairness of things, I can understand why Mariam and Laila went along with the paths that were offered them.
I was genuinely shocked by the way the women and children are treated by some of the characters, oddly enough less by the physical abuse and more of the mental abuse and inequality.
I was impressed that religion doesn't actually play a big part in this book, instead it's an insight into the culture of the country over the last three decades.
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26 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
Enjoyable and enlightening, but ..., 21 May 2008
I had read and enjoyed Hosseini's first novel, "The Kite Runner" and was really looking forward to reading this. You can see immediately the similarities with the previous book in the setting, Afghanistan, and style - teaching the reader about Afghan life and troubles through very personal and powerful stories of individuals.
But the are are many differences too. The main characters this time are two women and the historical period is longer, from the 1970s to 2003. So, we learn about Afghan life under the tribal wars, fighting the Russians, the arrival and dominance of the Taliban, and much later the arrival of the Americans and their allies.
The characters are strongly, if not always fully, drawn and we are made very much to empathise with Mariam at first as she is taken to be the wife of a much older man, Rasheed, who turns out to be very cruel, and later Laila, the second, younger and more passive heroine, who is tricked into marrying the same tyrant. The relationship between the two women grows and their suffering and tribulations are described in great detail, so we are drawn into their lives very much.
My response to the book changed as I read it. At first I was thinking I was was reading a book for teenagers as first Mariam and later Laila were young and we were led to empathise with them. This changed, however, as they aged, and the violence increased. Later I felt the characters were too simply drawn: both heroines were too good and Rasheed too evil - I wanted to know what made him like that. In fact most characters were black or white. Mariam's father was the one exception [could we have a spin-off about him?] - a weak man who could not make a stand for his principles and loves.
The ending was the biggest disappointment. Not what happened to Mariam [I won't give that away] but the return of another character was just too neat, too pat a way to end the story. It just convinced me of one feeling I had frequently during the reading, that I was being manipulated a little too obviously into feeling specific things about specific people and events. The epilogue was the final straw, pointing you to a website where you can make contributions to work done in Afghanistan. Was the whole story leading to that?
I feel Hosseini is an excellent story-teller but not a great novelist. He knows exactly how to spin a yarn and pull in the reader to that world and the people in it. He has done excellent service to his country [although, unlike Laila, he does not seem to want to return there from California] in using his narrative skills to point us to their situation. When he starts to write about other places and other issues, then it will be interesting to see if has the same popular appeal. Meanwhile, "A Thousand Splendid Suns" has cemented his growing reputation and good luck to him.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
A Wonderful Reading Experience!, 19 Aug 2008
Having just finished A Thousand Splendid Suns I can now put aside any questions I had about Hosseini being able to write a book that can come close to matching the heartwarming and often heartwrenching reading experience he provided in The Kite Runner. A Thousand Splendid Sun is every bit as good as The Kite Runner -- and in many ways is even better! It is an astonishing, powerful book that had me riveted from the first to the last page, and is broader in scope than The Kite Runner. It is a story of two generations of characters brought together by the tragic sweep of war, where personal lives -- the struggle to survive, raise a family, find happiness -- are inextricable from the history playing out around them. A Thousand Splendid Suns is not just a great, although overwhelmingly sad, story, it is history lesson of Afghanistan's last thirty years -- from the Soviet invasion to the reign of the Taliban to post-Taliban rebuilding -- that puts the violence, fear, hope and faith of this country in extremely intimate, human terms. Hosseini is a masterful writer whose prose and narrative style ooze emotion. If you have any hesitancy about reading this book, put your doubts aside and rush out to get yourself a copy of A Thousand Splendid Suns. You'll be very glad you did. It is not only a book that will keep you from doing anything else but turning the pages, it is a book that will stay in your head and heart for years to come. It is that good, although that tragic!
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