You searched for book_author:"Khaled Hosseini"
My experience with The Kite Runner is almost the reverse of my experience with A Thousand Splendid Suns. Instead of starting dubious and warming up to the book, I started very invested and gradually felt more distant. Khaled Hosseini is skilled at manipulating emotions—but when you strip away this manipulation, what’s left is rather unimpressive. That is to say, while reading The Kite Runner, I was moved. I felt for Amir and his…
At the beginning, A Thousand Splendid Suns did little to win me over. Its characters seemed shallow, transparent: Mariam’s mother was vindictive and manipulative, her actions and reactions shockingly outsized. Mariam marries Rasheed, who turned out to be exactly the kind of one-note bully I expected him to be. Even when Laila entered the story and began her slow, awkward, inevitable dance with Tariq, I was still not convinced. But then the communist regime fell…