A review by badspringbye
And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini

emotional informative reflective slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot

3.5

"What was I, Maman? A seed of hope? A ticket purchased to ferry you from the dark? A patch for that hole you carried in your heart? If so, then I wasn't enough. I was no balm to your pain, only another dead end, another burden, and you must have seen that early on."

I wish he just stopped writing at 300-page mark. even an open ending would work better than having more characters I no longer care about (coughs. the last one). this is mostly (maybe) because the brother-sister foundation was strong enough to keep me intrigued but the more the construction of respective stories of secondary characters broadens, I became less absorbed. I felt the disappointment after reading past the first half or almost 3/4 of this because I was starting to appreciate it at that point.

if you read the first two books of Hosseini, you would definitely recognize this book's his most recent one. the setting, dialogues, modernistic approach of building the mutual relationships... not bad, just a little odd. when you think of it as a finished story, it's good. but the process of reading it, I'm not quite sure what to say, a bit bland at times? when you put it down for some time, it'll feel distant, just as much as the characters does. whenever I finally get to link-up with one character, one second and the story switches up. their part gets cut off and we never get to hear them again. I can't even count how much I felt interrupted because of this.

I do think that the stories are all connected in the end and utterly shows how single decision at one point of a person's life can affect generations and a lot more individuals one can think of, regardless of the time/setting (this book spans decades and continents apart). final thoughts: I think he tried to cover way too much. that's why I'm struggling to explain it.

excerpts:
p. 13 "When you have lived as long as I have, you find that cruelty and benevolence are but shades of the same color."
p. 78 "A story is like a moving train: no matter where you hop onboard, you are bound to reach your destination sooner or later."
p. 137 "..I know now that some people feel unhappiness the way others love: privately, intensely, and without recourse."
p. 218 "'Are you pleased with any of your work?'
'...if only I could keep them apart from the creative process itself.'
'You mean separate the end from the means.'"