Book Review: And the Mountains Echoed

Khaled Hosseini is an amazing writer.  He weaves stories like silk and peoples their landscape with warm characters fraught with relational conflicts.  While I absolutely loved his first two books, The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, this book didn't quite reach the same level.  I'm not saying it isn't worth the time to read.  I would still tout it as a good read, but not as riveting or dynamic.

The story centers on two motherless siblings, Abdullah (age 10) and Pari (age 3), with a powerful bond.  It opens with a story told by their father of a father forced to choose one child to give up to a powerful genie to protect the rest of the family and village, foreshadowing events to come.  The story is poignant and forces the reader to put themselves in the father's shoes.  The rest of the book, follows the lives of this family and other intersecting families over the years.  It highlights the consequences of choices we make, the troubled bonds between family members, the fallout from political events, and the satisfaction available for a life lived in service to another.  It is a gripping story and I quickly absorbed the full 400 pages.

I do think the book could have been edited down to 300 pages.  The story jumped around from one time period to another following the various lives of different characters.  This jumping around fragmented the story line.  Plus, there were times when the author followed characters who were rather minor in the story (Markos and Adel) and didn't matter to the central arc of the tale.  Moreover, the most powerful situation was that between Abdullah and Pari and yet it was treated as a peripheral component.

But, setting these criticisms aside, the book is remarkable in its scope.  It manages to weave together numerous relational experiences under the canopy of one story.  You have the difficulties which arise in an adoptive relationship, the complexities of a caretaker who is loved by his employer, the emptiness of lives ripped apart by loss, and the horrors of a child forced to fend off society's curiosity after a disfigurement.  Each of these elements is powerful on its own, but they are woven together to form a magnificent tapestry of humanity.  Although the book didn't contain the height of redemption which The Kite Runner offered, or the depth of political atrocities explored in A Thousand Splendid Suns, it still presented a telling view of the world of Afghanistan and an accurate assessment of human frailty.  The book spans the globe, journeying from Afghanistan to France to America to Greece.  Like a kaleidoscope, the tale reveals the story of each character and brings them together to form a beautiful, thought-provoking, picture.  It was an adventure worth taking.