The Kite Runner (Riverhead Essential Editions)
by Khaled Hosseini

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Book Reviews of The Kite Runner (Riverhead Essential Editions)

Book Review: Familiar Theme New Perspective
Summary: 4 Stars

This is not the view we are often exposed to with the lines drawn simply between East and West, demarcations broadly defined between Christianity and Islam. These are not the shallow glimpses that are convenient to news organizations. The author brings you to the Islamic life that is divided dramatically between Sunni and Shia, Pashtun and Hazara. The primary characters occupying opposing sides are two young boys, one the son of a wealthy merchant, the other a servant of the same merchant’s household. They are at once best friends while living with barriers each knows cannot be crossed.

This book takes some patience, a bit of time to grow accustomed to some language that is unfamiliar to the western ear even as the author presents his tale in solid unadorned prose. This is a story about character, truth, and the ease with which both can be amended and rationalized. It’s about redemption and its pursuit; it is about profound regret and inaction. Perception can create the view that differences between societal beliefs are tremendous are cannot be reconciled. The truth is often different and the author portrays fathers, sons and mothers that share the same wishes and disappointments that all families face, endure, and survive.

The horrors and persecution are also universal whether an individual keeps his eyes averted from the Taliban, minions of Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia or the dark days of Jim Crow in this country. The author himself is an ?migr? of the country he writes about and so the reader can expect that what one is exposed to in the nation’s customs, prejudices and History are accurate. This is a nation that many books have viewed fictionally as settings for thrillers and now with, “The Kite Runner”, has been presented as fiction, albeit a very personal and more literary one.

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