This was supposed to be our March Book Club selection but because of a snafu And the Mountains Echoed ended up being our April selection and I’m a bit bummed because I’m going to have to miss that meeting. I want to go that meeting because I really would like to hear what others thought of the book.
You see, I think Khaled Hosseini, perhaps best know for The Kite Runner, is an amazing writer. He strings together words beautifully creating vivid pictures and rich and always flawed characters that seem so real and so tragic. Yet, I found this book a bit hard to get into initially, not because I wasn’t immediately drawn into the world of Pari and Abdullah, but because as soon as I was, that world shifted to that of their step-uncle Nabi, then to be replaced by the story of Timir and Idris and I got pissed. It’s hard to get into a book when you’re not vested in any single character.
Then I realized, this isn’t so much a novel as it is a series of short stories with a certain common theme (and don’t worry, you eventually do return to Abdullah and Pari), almost in the way Olive Kitteridge is a series of short stories that intersect with Olive’s life in some way. After that, I happily if not bittersweetly plowed through to the end.
Overall, while the flashbacks and bouncing through time as well as the myriad of characters proved to be a bit disconcerting until I was able to devote several uninterrupted hours to the book, and not every store resolves (sorry Stephanie, not everything has explanation or closure), I’m glad I spent time in its world.