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A review by goodreadswithamila
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
5.0
"For you, a thousand times over"
I have owned this book for nearly 10 years and I could not get myself to pick it up. I am disappointed in myself that it took 10 years of owning this book to read it. This book has tons of trigger warnings such as: extreme cruelty and violence, rape, murder, alcohol/drug use, and suicide attempt. This book made me feel all sorts of emotions, it was literally like a rollercoaster of emotions. But I feel like there is such a great message in it all. Tell the ones you love that you love them, and always be kind because you never know someones story. I don’t think any other book has made me cry as much as this one- this one takes the cake.
There is something I want to add that I normally do not in my reviews, and I’m only writing it because I saw it on a Goodreads review and truly it rubbed me the wrong way. A critic on Goodreads found the use of Farsi distracting, claiming that “no one speaks the way his characters speak” and going on to talk about that people don’t use half of one language with half of the other. As a Bosnian-American who is fluent in both Bosnian and English I can attest to the fact that yes, foreign speakers do in fact switch between languages in sentences, sometimes without even realizing. I do this often. This critic gave this book a 1 star rating (to each their own) but it was because they could not simply understand what it is to speak another language, to be a foreigner basically in both your birth country and the country you live in, and to have a hard time calling either country “home”. It’s the privilege that prevents people from actually understanding and enjoying this book. Yes, this is fictional but it does shed light into the atrocities that happen in Afghanistan that MANY other countries can relate to. I highly recommend everyone give this book an actual chance.
I have owned this book for nearly 10 years and I could not get myself to pick it up. I am disappointed in myself that it took 10 years of owning this book to read it. This book has tons of trigger warnings such as: extreme cruelty and violence, rape, murder, alcohol/drug use, and suicide attempt. This book made me feel all sorts of emotions, it was literally like a rollercoaster of emotions. But I feel like there is such a great message in it all. Tell the ones you love that you love them, and always be kind because you never know someones story. I don’t think any other book has made me cry as much as this one- this one takes the cake.
There is something I want to add that I normally do not in my reviews, and I’m only writing it because I saw it on a Goodreads review and truly it rubbed me the wrong way. A critic on Goodreads found the use of Farsi distracting, claiming that “no one speaks the way his characters speak” and going on to talk about that people don’t use half of one language with half of the other. As a Bosnian-American who is fluent in both Bosnian and English I can attest to the fact that yes, foreign speakers do in fact switch between languages in sentences, sometimes without even realizing. I do this often. This critic gave this book a 1 star rating (to each their own) but it was because they could not simply understand what it is to speak another language, to be a foreigner basically in both your birth country and the country you live in, and to have a hard time calling either country “home”. It’s the privilege that prevents people from actually understanding and enjoying this book. Yes, this is fictional but it does shed light into the atrocities that happen in Afghanistan that MANY other countries can relate to. I highly recommend everyone give this book an actual chance.