Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I am not a best-seller type of reader. Maybe my tastes stray too much away from the mainstream, but i rarely get entranced by a best-seller the way i see other people. But this book somehow piqued my curiosity, so i went for it. If cable channels produced daytime soap-operas, this is what they would look like. The stage is grand: a poor and proud country. At the center of the story we have a dysfunctional family with a few secrets. And then the soap-opera gets its wheels in motion, only that instead of the corny moves of Days of Our Lives, what we have here is rape and sadistic killings and blood and gore. I had a hard time swallowing the amount of misfortune that some of the characters had to endure. After a while the relentless catastrophes made me very mad. This novel placed a high stake on its shock value, and won, based on the number of copies sold. Do people want to be shocked so mercilessly by what they read? Apparently yes. And also by what they watch on TV, and this is why programs where contestants have to eat worms have such a following. Sadly, this book is no different. I would clench my teeth at the beginning of a new chapter, afraid of what horrible thing was going to take place next. Some of the key characters were absolute clichés, which is funny because Amir, the narrator, complained about clichés. We have the polar opposites of good (Hassan) and evil (Assef). There are no gray shades there. They are 100% good and 100% bad. Amir draws very little sympathy. He comes across as a complete coward, and even when he knows he needs to float above his own shortcomings, he chokes, and then spends several pages justifying himself. The only truly interesting character in the whole book is Baba, Amir's larger-than-life father. The parts where Amir talks about his father are the best in the book. But you see, those parts are only about human nature and relationships. It doesn't matter what country or what culture you're from: people react to people and feelings the same way everywhere, and the complexities of love and hate and anger between human beings are and will forever be fascinating. The rest of the book, quite honestly, was never at the same level. My biggest caveats, in no particular order: The many examples of karma in action stink, they are so obvious and contrived: son avenging father using slingshot, one of the attackers of young Hassan suffering the same type of abuse himself, Amir's scar on his lip after the beating, and on and on and on... The very convenient plot details and coincidences: Soraya has an uncle who works at the INS, sadistic Assef finds the little boy among the thousands of orphans in Kabul... The way the characters' speech is portrayed drove me nutty. If they are Afghani, they are speaking in Farsi. Amir transcribes their speech into English. Why then pepper the dialog with non-English words?!?! And to make matters worse, there is no glossary at the end to help you remember what those words meant! The arrogance of the writer, who spells things out for you because he may fear you are too dumb to figure them out. As a reader, i like to be surprised. I hate predictability, yet here you knew what was going to happen with the boy once Amir discovered Hassan had a son. You knew who the evil executioner was in the soccer stadium... The ending was too much. The book gets nicely wrapped up with Amir and the little boy flying kites in San Francisco. That was too corny, too sickly sweet. All along the novel plays with the feelings of the reader, and this After-School-Special ending was the final drop. Apart from the brightness that Baba brings to the story, and the curiosity i have developed to finally see one of those glass strings for the kites (didn't they have gloves in Afghanistan?), this book was an utter disappointment.