“A story is like a moving train: no matter where you hop onboard, you are bound to reach your destination sooner or later.” ― Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed

I have to admit that reading the book takes 5 day of yours while commenting on it takes almost a month!
Hosseini makes you feel so many things that I don’t know where I should start.
He told a thousand stories in one story, as always. In the very first pages, you understand that you are in the good hands of a great writer. And he opened a giant window to the familiar, but as much different world of a story which can time travel and exist in different locations. It gives breath of life the characters, but it takes their lives in unexpected moments, too.
It is pretty hard to expect happy endings from Khaled Hosseini’s works. Just like his past two novels, he went through the theme of “human kind messing up everything” all over again. And the Mountains Echoed is a story developed on choices convicted to be made.
Most of us complain about books’ not taking us into them, characters’ being too perfect to be real or us facing predictable endings. Even sometimes we cannot finish them; we carry them in our bags for a while, then they wander around our bedside, finally doomed to get dusty in shelves meticulously. So, you won’t experience this kind of a disappointment with this book. You adopt the defects of characters and embrace their problems. You’re surrounded by characters, so to speak. You know the common “bad guy,” right? You understand, you feel that bad guy in this book. Some writers draw pictures with words; Hosseini draws you into that picture; that’s the difference.
It seems like the readers of Hosseini agree on that And the Mountains Echoed doesn’t taste good as much the other two books of his did. But this is a comment we often hear for writers like Dan Brown or J. K. Rowling who captured a fast-glory from their first works. Reader always expects better. I cannot say there is not any part that you would like to tear out from the story. You may say “what is the function of this” from time to time. But generally, the book is far from being a leeway.
Enjoy the novel, dear fiction lovers 🙂
Here are a couple of words from the book’s official promotion;
“Abdullah and his sister Peri lives with their step mother in 1952’s Afghanistan. Their father Sabri always looks for job, struggles with the cruelty of poverty and hard conditions of winter. Peri, who is as much beautiful and good-natured as her name, means everything to her brother Abdullah. Abdullah is much of a parent to Peri more than a brother. They must share a couch at nights. Peri and Abdullah are not aware of their incoming fate which is going to seperate them from each other when they set off towards Kabul with their father. The book tells us a deep story passing through generations and continents; starting with Kabul to Paris, San Fransisco and Greek islands of Tinos.”