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4.48 AVERAGE
4.48 AVERAGE
challenging
emotional
reflective
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
dark
emotional
sad
challenging
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
dark
emotional
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
" . . .A Thousand Splendid Suns is at once an incredible chronicle of thirty years of Afghan history and a deeply moving story of family, friendship, faith, and the salvation to be found in love.
Born a generation apart and with very different ideas about love and family, Mariam and Laila are two women brought jarringly together by war, by loss and by fate. As they endure the ever escalating dangers around them—in their home as well as in the streets of Kabul—they come to form a bond that makes them both sisters and mother-daughter to each other, and that will ultimately alter the course not just of their own lives but of the next generation. With heart-wrenching power and suspense, Hosseini shows how a woman's love for her family can move her to shocking and heroic acts of self-sacrifice, and that in the end it is love, or even the memory of love, that is often the key to survival."--KhaledHosseini.com
The book starts out in West Afghanistan. There are two main characters: two women who end up married to the same man, who are brutally beaten by him.
If I've faced abuse by men in the United states, in this book the two women characters are faced with 10 times the amount of abuse I ever had.
Mariam's mom had worked in a household with an upper middle class afghanistan. The man pushed her to sexual relations, and when she fell pregnant by him, she was kicked out of the house by the wives. He found her a shack to live in in a small village far enough away that he would not face embarrassment from nana.
When Mariam was a teenager, he told her he would take her to see Pinocchio in the theater he owned. On the day that he said he would come, she waited excitedly but he never came. She walked all the way to his house, but they wouldn't let her in.
"Mariam kept thinking of his face in the upstairs window. He let her sleep on the street. On the street. Mariam cried lying down. She didn’t sit up, didn’t want to be seen."
Jalil's driver took her back home. He was walking her to their door when suddenly:
"then suddenly he was standing in front of her, trying to cover her eyes, pushing her back the way they had come and saying, “Go back! No. Don’t look now. Turn around! Go back!” But he wasn’t fast enough. Mariam saw. A gust of wind blew and parted the drooping branches of the weeping willow like a curtain, and Mariam caught a glimpse of what was beneath the tree: the straight-backed chair, overturned. The rope dropping from a high branch. Nana dangling at the end of it.
All she could hear was Nana saying, I’ll die if you go. I’ll just die."
He took her back to her father's house, and they put her in the guest room. She never came out except to use the bathroom. To get rid of her, they set her up with a arranged marriage to an older man who had lost his wife and his son. When she told her father she didn't want to marry him,
" “Say something,” Mariam said. Then Jalil did, in a thin, threadbare voice. “Goddamn it, Mariam, don’t do this to me,” he said as though he was the one to whom something was being done. And, with that, Mariam felt the tension vanish from the room."
"Mariam had her first glimpse of Rasheed: the big, square, ruddy face; the hooked nose; the flushed cheeks that gave the impression of sly cheerfulness; the watery, bloodshot eyes; the crowded teeth, the front two pushed together like a gabled roof; the impossibly low hairline, barely two finger widths above the bushy eyebrows; the wall of thick, coarse, salt-and-pepper hair."
She agrees to marry this old man, but first she confronts Jalil:
" “On Thursdays, I sat for hours waiting for you. I worried myself sick that you wouldn’t show up.” “It’s a long trip. You should eat something.” He said he could buy her some bread and goat cheese. “I thought about you all the time. I used to pray that you’d live to be a hundred years old. I didn’t know. I didn’t know that you were ashamed of me.” Jalil looked down, and, like an overgrown child, dug at something with the toe of his shoe. “You were ashamed of me.” “I’ll visit you,” he muttered. “I’ll come to Kabul and see you. We’ll—” “No. No,” she said. “Don’t come. I won’t see you. Don’t you come. I don’t want to hear from you. Ever. Ever.”
On the bus on the way to Kabul, Mariam misses her little shack and begins to cry. Her so called husband is no comfort:
" "Stop your crying, now. I mean it.” Mariam dabbed at her eyes. “That’s one thing I can’t stand,” he said, scowling, “the sound of a woman crying. I’m sorry. I have no patience for it.”
He tells her she has to wear a burka in public.
"And the burqa, she learned to her surprise, was also comforting. It was like a one-way window. Inside it, she was an observer, buffered from the scrutinizing eyes of strangers. She no longer worried that people knew, with a single glance, all the shameful secrets of her past."
The brutality begins. She is not allowed to have any opinion, and has so-called husband has no interest in anything she has to say. Boys from the neighborhood are drafted to go fight, and she wants to know the future of their country:
" “What I meant was, what do they want?” Mariam asked. “These communists, what is it that they believe?” Rasheed chortled and shook his head, but Mariam thought she saw uncertainty in the way he crossed his arms, the way his eyes shifted. “You know nothing, do you? You’re like a child. Your brain is empty. There is no information in it.” “I ask because—” “Chup ko. Shut up.” Mariam did."
"And Mariam was afraid. She lived in fear of his shifting moods, his volatile temperament, his insistence on steering even mundane exchanges down a confrontational path that, on occasion, he would resolve with punches, slaps, kicks, and sometimes try to make amends for with polluted apologies and sometimes not."
Now the story shifts to laila, the girl who was born in the house down the street from Mariam's, in Kabul.
"On the wall behind Khala Rangmaal’s [her teacher] desk was a map of the Soviet Union, a map of Afghanistan, and a framed photo of the latest communist president, Najibullah, who, Babi said, had once been the head of the dreaded KHAD, the Afghan secret police."
"This was her nickname for Laila, Revolutionary Girl, because she’d been born the night of the April coup of 1978—except Khala Rangmaal became angry if anyone in her class used the word coup. What had happened, she insisted, was an inqilab, a revolution, an uprising of the working people against inequality."
When Mariam met Laila's mother, she had been a lively member of the neighborhood. But when her sons were drafted to fight, she sank into depression and wouldn't take care of anything. She would no longer cook, and she didn't pick Layla up from school anymore.
"Sometimes Laila wondered why Mammy had even bothered having her. People, she believed now, shouldn’t be allowed to have new children if they’d already given away all their love to their old ones."
This is my motto.
Luckily for laila, her father is there for her. He is a teacher, and always takes her into his study and gives her extra lessons.
"Women have always had it hard in this country, Laila, but they’re probably more free now, under the communists, and have more rights than they’ve ever had before, Babi said, always lowering his voice, aware of how intolerant Mammy was of even remotely positive talk of the communists."
Laila's brothers are killed in the fighting, and if Laila's mom was depressed before, now she's almost non-existent. She stays in bed, and often stares at the pictures of her brothers that are on her wall.
"Laila lay there and listened, wishing Mammy would notice that she, Laila, hadn’t become shaheed, that she was alive, here, in bed with her, that she had hopes and a future. But Laila knew that her future was no match for her brothers’ past."
I also had a mother who cared more about her sons when she did about her daughters. Rest in peace mom.
"in April 1988, Babi came home with big news. “They signed a treaty!” he said. “In Geneva. It’s official! They’re leaving. Within nine months, there won’t be any more Soviets in Afghanistan!” "
The people think this is good news, but they have so much worse that's coming.
For the rest of my review see my highlights on Goodreads.
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
sad
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
it was so disturbing (but thats i was there for and it was even more intense than expected)
it was also wholesome at aome parts
and i loved to learn something about a country i didnt know as much as i know now
it was also wholesome at aome parts
and i loved to learn something about a country i didnt know as much as i know now
Content Warnings
Graphic: Adult/minor relationship, Child abuse, Death, Domestic abuse, Gun violence, Infertility, Miscarriage, Misogyny, Physical abuse, Rape, Sexism, Sexual content, Sexual violence, Violence, Medical content, Grief, Death of parent, Murder, Pregnancy, Abandonment, Sexual harassment, War, Injury/Injury detail
emotional
inspiring
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
N/A
This is what books are for - to take you to places you would never go to, to experience a different culture and life through someone else's eyes. I am thankful to my book club for this selection. Otherwise, I may have never read it. I was completely transported to a very troublesome place and time, Afghanistan, throughout several decades. It all happened during my lifetime, things that were little blips in our U.S. news, are explored with impact. That subject is why I previously haven't read this - it seemed too depressing. But the author makes it approachable through an ease of reading. You are with characters you feel for and somehow can relate to, even though our American lives are so different. This story will stick with me forever.
challenging
dark
hopeful
informative
inspiring
sad
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death, Domestic abuse, Misogyny, Sexism, Toxic relationship, Violence, Grief, Murder
dark
sad
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes