Reviews tagging 'Injury/Injury detail'

Les cerfs-volants de Kaboul by Khaled Hosseini

98 reviews

mimsyweretheborogoves's review against another edition

challenging dark 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

3.0

 

the kite runner is told in three very distinct parts. it begins in afghanistan in the 1970s following twelve-year-old friends amir and hassan. amir watches hassan get raped and feels so guilty about not stopping it that he has to be really mean to hassan from this point forth. he emigrates to america with his dad, where he continues to feel guilty about a hassan who will not do anything else in the story and exists exclusively for symbolic reasons. in his forties he returns to afghanistan, now under taliban rule, to feel guilty about hassan some more.

 

 

i did like parts of this book. there were just a lot of parts i didn’t like. 

 

i really enjoyed the first third of it – story about kids growing up in a ‘troubled’ country? sign me up, i love the book thief. i loved the way afghanistan was presented through nostalgia, i loved hassan and amir’s friendship and even though i really don’t like when rape is used as a plot device i was interested to see the direction it would go in. it felt like there were some very clear themes set up. but then it didn't develop on them. to say the central thread of the story was supposed to be about hassan and amir’s relationship, hassan disappeared around page 100 and there was a lot of time spent on amir brooding about how guilty he felt. 

 

for me it felt like all of the stuff i’d liked in the first third went out of the window when he went to america. it became a completely different book, about a country i am fed up of reading about, and i thought it was honestly quite dull. the only feelings i had about amir and soraya's relationship were annoyance: i literally do not care that amir was embarrassed about having male privilege, it just made him read like he was hosseini’s self insert. if you’re such a feminist, maybe give us a female character who isn’t defined by her relationship to a man, okay? 

 

the bit where amir returned to afghanistan was the bit i’d been expecting when i started reading, but i was let down. there was no actual exploration of the conflict; the taliban were a very generic Big Bad, no nuance to it. it was such a westernised perspective. i liked that assef returned to be evil again, but he was such a poorly written villain. the reason he was a nazi and a pedophile was to make sure people knew this was the Bad Guy, representing the Bad Organisation. amir’s fight with him was exciting, sure, but it was such a straightforward hero/villain dynamic that it wasn't interesting. 

 

everything felt both underexplained and overexplained at once. the actual history and political situation of afghanistan was underexplained (idyllic romanticised place suddenly invaded by russia suddenly invaded by evil group? please elaborate – how did this happen? how did it affect people who weren’t rich and able to move to america?) in favour of talking down to the reader about vague cultural stuff. even if i’d known nothing about islam going in i’d have been able to work out that “eid mubarak” translates to “happy eid”; i haven't learnt anything here. 

 

a couple of things really got on my nerves about the writing itself, but these were more stylistic preferences. using words from other languages in books works sometimes, but in this book hosseini would use a farsi word and translate it IMMEDIATELY every single time rather than allowing the reader to pick it up from context. as well, hosseini really enjoys putting a full stop where a comma would suffice. that can work for sometimes, i guess, but using it all the time undermines the effect of using it in a tense scene. 

 

i did like some aspects of it. as well as the beginning, i found baba a really interesting character to read, and i quite enjoyed all the cheesy stuff linking sohrab and amir and assef and hassan in some fated absolution of amir’s passivity. i am overall just rather disappointed. 

3 stars

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Rape, Pedophilia, Death of parent, and Suicide attempt

Moderate: Child abuse, Genocide, and Injury/Injury detail

political prisoners get publicly executed

mrinmayi's review against another edition

emotional hopeful reflective sad medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Rape, Pedophilia, Racial slurs, War, Sexual violence, Physical abuse, and Injury/Injury detail

lorriss's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional sad tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Blood, Bullying, Cancer, Death, Death of parent, Genocide, Grief, Gun violence, Hate crime, Infertility, Injury/Injury detail, Mass/school shootings, Medical content, Murder, Physical abuse, Rape, Sexual assault, Sexual violence, Terminal illness, Violence, War, and Xenophobia

Moderate: Adult/minor relationship, Child abuse, Cursing, Mental illness, Miscarriage, Misogyny, Pedophilia, Racial slurs, Racism, Religious bigotry, Suicidal thoughts, Suicide attempt, and Vomit

Minor: Addiction, Alcohol, Classism, Infidelity, Kidnapping, Pregnancy, and Suicide

claudiamv's review against another edition

dark emotional inspiring reflective sad medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Murder, Torture, War, Vomit, Sexual assault, Sexual harassment, Self harm, Physical abuse, Rape, Violence, Gun violence, Death, Child abuse, Bullying, Suicide attempt, Suicide, Sexual violence, Religious bigotry, Medical content, Infertility, Child death, Blood, Alcohol, Abandonment, Islamophobia, Injury/Injury detail, and Death of parent

leahrosiee's review against another edition

challenging dark sad slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.25

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Bullying, Death of parent, Gun violence, Injury/Injury detail, Police brutality, Rape, Trafficking, Blood, Medical content, Miscarriage, Murder, Racism, Racial slurs, Self harm, Terminal illness, Violence, Cancer, Child abuse, Islamophobia, Pedophilia, Physical abuse, Sexual violence, Suicide attempt, and War

Moderate: Infertility

Minor: Pregnancy, Child death, and Infidelity

rettasbookshelf's review against another edition

dark emotional inspiring reflective sad tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Suicide attempt, Genocide, Gore, Death of parent, Death, Child death, Rape, Pedophilia, Infertility, Colonisation, Abandonment, War, Violence, Toxic friendship, Suicidal thoughts, Suicide, Sexual violence, Sexual content, Sexual assault, Self harm, Physical abuse, Murder, Medical content, Medical trauma, Injury/Injury detail, Grief, Emotional abuse, Child abuse, and Blood

jessamine864's review against another edition

challenging dark informative sad tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

Trigger Warnings for this book! This book granted is well written and informative of a horrific period of relatively recent history. But it is harrowing.... I mean just look at the trigger warnings already put in by the reviews. This book is dark and darker. Partly the gut-wrenchingly horrible part of it is that you can see this is based in truth and these things happened to many people and are still happening around the world. I had to finish it to find out what happened and read it in 4hrs straight, but my mind is still troubled and will be for a while I think. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Adult/minor relationship, Animal cruelty, Blood, Bullying, Cancer, Child abuse, Classism, Confinement, Death, Death of parent, Emotional abuse, Genocide, Gore, Grief, Gun violence, Hate crime, Infertility, Injury/Injury detail, Kidnapping, Mass/school shootings, Medical content, Mental illness, Miscarriage, Murder, Panic attacks/disorders, Pedophilia, Physical abuse, Racism, Racial slurs, Rape, Self harm, Sexual assault, Sexual violence, Suicide, Suicide attempt, Violence, War, and Xenophobia

jasleen14's review against another edition

adventurous challenging emotional inspiring reflective sad medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Blood, Bullying, Cancer, Injury/Injury detail, Murder, Rape, Suicide attempt, and Suicide

Minor: Infertility

nisanatreads's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional reflective tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

I don't know what to say. This had to have been one of the best books I have ever read. It's hard to find the right words to describe what this book made me feel. It is a powerful story about friendship, family and war. Besides the impactful story of Amir and Hassan it tells us the story of an Afghanistan which seems so sincere and real that it's hard to grasp what has happened to it. In my opinion Khaled Hosseini does a masterful job at showing a nation which has only ever been seen from a Western point of view.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Rape, Suicide attempt, Violence, Injury/Injury detail, Infertility, Death of parent, Child abuse, Miscarriage, and Genocide

lilyenglish8's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Injury/Injury detail, Self harm, Blood, Child abuse, Sexual assault, Bullying, Rape, Suicide attempt, and Violence

Moderate: Infertility, Genocide, Death, Death of parent, Grief, and War

Minor: Alcohol, Cursing, Terminal illness, and Cancer