“When you kill a man, you steal his life. You steal his wife’s right to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone’s right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness.”
Amir was born to a wealthy family. His father is a well-known personality and they live a good life with their housekeeper and his son. But life as he knows it begins to change when people tried to conquer the country he once called home, secrets start to surface, and everything unravels one piece, slowly, at a time.
Historical Fiction has always been one of the many genres I am weak with. I don’t know what about it makes it such a complicated read for me but, for some reason, it always is. It does, however, happen that there are books that really get me hooked. And this is one of those books.
The Kite Runner is a book that I told myself that I will read a long long time ago. Strongly, due to my desire to diversify the authors that I read and because I wanted to immerse myself in different cultures–although this is partly a lie since I have no real idea what the book is about. I simply assumed that it won’t be the stereotypical white character trying to be someone else. To my surprise, my friend, Chestine, wanted to read the book. So I finally had a reason to pick it up.
This book gripped me from behind. It’s claws digging into my shoulder, inching deeper and deeper with each page I turn. I was so lost, so drowned in grief that I had to just put the book on my lap and take a deep breath. Every part of the story was captivating, the way it draws out every emotion in your body shows just how effective it is as a story.
Aside from the story alone, what I love most about reading this was all of its characters. They were so real, so pained, so human. They anger you, they make you feel sorry for them, but also, they make you feel how true they are as a person. The way each of them do what they do in order to either preserve themselves or the absolute kindness that makes you think that the person might be lacking genuine personality. I loved all of them–protagonists, antagonists, and background characters alike.
Finishing this book was both a struggle and an accomplishment. It opened my eyes to the reality that one day your life is as comfortable as that of a king, but with just the turn of a wheel, you might be slowly dropping from its highest peak to the lowest point. I was struck by the gut-wrenching reality of the need to sacrifice in order to protect the ones we love. I am, for sure, reading more from Hosseini!
