Khaled Hosseini
2007
Riverhead
pp. 432
Hosseini’s second book weaves an engaging tale around the lives of Mariam and Leila. Unlike his earlier work, this book presents female protagonists who strive through trying circumstances. While the context is quite similar to The Kite Runner, the protagonists gender, and thus the central themes are different. Anyone who has read his first work would experience a sense of deja vu at several points. I can’t pin point an exact episode that is similar, but it all seemed very familiar, the language, the settings, the nature of relationships. Nevertheless, this book is also as engaging as the previous one.
You can’t help feeling strongly for the women in the story. Experiencing restriction, discrimination, violence and abuse is a routine event. I sometimes also wonder if there would be any focus on the perpetrators and why they become perpetrators. Without an understanding of why it is routine for them to induce physical and/or emotional abuse, how do we ever understand systematization of discrimination.
The characters in this book lean towards absolutism of black and white. However, they are still realistic and the book doesn’t end with a set of happy coincidences. In that, it is more believable, even when being a fictional tale.
