May 28, 2016 10:22 PM
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“It may be unfair, but what happens in a few days, sometimes even a single day, can change the course of a whole lifetime."
What I am about to tell you about what I became is going to be very shocking. It is going to manipulate your emotions. It may include some random words in my native language for no reason whatsoever. It will teach you unnecessary things about my culture. It will not be smarter than a fifth grader. And it will include as many cliches and as much foreshadowing as is humanly possible.
Finished this book about a month ago but it's taken me this long to write a review about it because I have such mixed feelings about it. It was a deeply affecting novel, but mostly not in a good way. I really wanted to like it, but the more I think about what I didn't like about the book, the more it bothers me.
my problems with the novel are as follows: first of all the writing itself is so ham-fistened, heavy-handed, distracting and otherwise puzzling that by the midway point, I seriously considered chucking the book against the wall.
In the wake of the Fraud of Small Things, tons of Asian writers with their impossibly exotic backgrounds and compellingly interesting lives have become all the rage in the publishing world. And of course, it doesn't get more exotic than Afghanistan these days