Book Review of The Month: "The Kite Runner" by Khaled Hosseini

This is Hopefully my first book review on my personal blog for the month of April, and I am excited to tell how much I like writing book reviews and recommending them to my friends and family.

So, Let's start with one of the books I have read in February of 2009; "The Kite Runner" by Khaled Hosseini... a fiction novel about an Afghan Pashtun boy named Amir who experiences the last peaceful days of the Afghan Monarchy in the late 1970s, just before his country gets invaded by Russian forces, and his best Hazara friend named Hassan who gets separated from him before the invasion. When Amir turned 18, his father and him migrate to Fremont,CA, where Amir goes to medical college and writes his novel about his struggle and experience in the Afghan-Soviet war, during his stay, he gets a call from Rahim Khan, his father's best friend, who tells him that his best friend, Hassan, has been executed by Taliban forces, and that Hassan left a message for Amir that contains an objective which is to go to the post-war Afghanistan and retrieve Hassan's Son, Sohrab, from the hands of the Taliban forces trying to turn him into a Hazara Slave.

That was a small brief summary of the novel, now let me give you details about this novel and what I think of it after I've finished reading it. The novel consists of 401 pages and each part of this novel is divided to different time eras (ex. 1978, 1981, 2001). The storyline was great and easy to comprehend and follow throughout the book, characters are lively and have multi-personalities which is a great approach that Khaled Hosseini did and is one that we can't find in other novels.

So, the characters are realistic, the storyline is charismatic, what about the pace of the novel...well, its not slow and its not fast which is the only drawback that I've noticed in this novel, I am not that of a fast reader, my average reading rate per day is 30 pages and it took me about 2 weeks to read it, and believe me when I tell you that this book dragged me thorugh sleepless nights, it was so irresistable and full of intensful moments that keep you hanged on to it. This book is especially dedicated to the homeless children of Afghanistan that live the daily life of horror and tragedy and will teach us several things including Afghan culture, Afghan names, The life of pre and post-war Afghanistan, The Taliban Terror and even small phrases and words in Farsi scattered throughout the book.

End Result: This is one hell of a book after all that deserves all of your precious times whether you like reading or not. Personally, I give this book a 9.5/10 for the only drawback of having a normal-paced read (not fast, not slow) other than that, it's pure class. For those who would like to see the movie of the same name I also recommend, The movie basically is 2.5 hours long and has Persian (Irani and Afghan) actors, The main language is Persian with english subtitles...As I said dear reader...If you haven't read this book yet, then you are cheating yourself.

(for more information and personal quote about this book please don't hesitate to get in touch with me).