This Aint Oprah's Book Club, Part IV

OK well I should have completed "The Life of Pi" by now. However, that is not the case. It's not that the book is not good...But it is more of a "nighttime" read...And well lately I have just been too tired. No worries though I picked up "The Kite Runner", by Khaled Hosseini, on my way to Jamaica so that I could have something to read on the flight. I must say that I enjoyed this book. "The Kite Runner" is a memoir of an Afghan man looking back at his life. As stated on Hosseini's website it is "an epic tale of fathers and sons, of friendship and betrayal, that takes us from the final days of Afghanistan's monarchy to the atrocities of the present."

From Publishers Weekly
Hosseini's stunning debut novel starts as an eloquent Afghan version of the American immigrant experience in the late 20th century, but betrayal and redemption come to the forefront when the narrator, a writer, returns to his ravaged homeland to rescue the son of his childhood friend after the boy's parents are shot during the Taliban takeover in the mid '90s. Amir, the son of a well-to-do Kabul merchant, is the first-person narrator, who marries, moves to California and becomes a successful novelist. But he remains haunted by a childhood incident in which he betrayed the trust of his best friend, a Hazara boy named Hassan, who receives a brutal beating from some local bullies. After establishing himself in America, Amir learns that the Taliban have murdered Hassan and his wife, raising questions about the fate of his son, Sohrab. Spurred on by childhood guilt, Amir makes the difficult journey to Kabul, only to learn the boy has been enslaved by a former childhood bully who has become a prominent Taliban official. The price Amir must pay to recover the boy is just one of several brilliant, startling plot twists that make this book memorable both as a political chronicle and a deeply personal tale about how childhood choices affect our adult lives. The character studies alone would make this a noteworthy debut, from the portrait of the sensitive, insecure Amir to the multilayered development of his father, Baba, whose sacrifices and scandalous behavior are fully revealed only when Amir returns to Afghanistan and learns the true nature of his relationship to Hassan. Add an incisive, perceptive examination of recent Afghan history and its ramifications in both America and the Middle East, and the result is a complete work of literature that succeeds in exploring the culture of a previously obscure nation that has become a pivot point in the global politics of the new millennium.

On a scale of 1-5 (1 being the worst and 5 being the best) I give "The Kite Runner" a 4. Not bad for an author's first book.