A thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

A decent emotional journey, like a bleak soap opera

KH knows to craft a page turner, no one can deny that. His style is, however, clumsy and irritatingly over-explanatory. I know that that is the cliched British criticism of American writing and cinema - it has to explain far too much, when my brain was quite capable of putting the pieces together and remembering earlier events in the book, thank you very much. As just one example of many: a girl tells her mother, who has been grieving for many years over the absence and then deaths of her Mujahideen sons, that her friend is like a brother to her. KH then needs to tell us that the girl knew that she had said the wrong thing as soon as it came out of her mouth. Thanks, KH, I would never have guessed.

This is a work of fiction, so I am not going to criticise KH on the grounds that he only spent a few childhood years (ages 0-5 and 8-11, according to Wiki P) in Afghanistan and has no first hand experience of what he is writing about. The description of Afghanistan is convincing enough for the story, but at no point did I feel as though I was getting any kind of special insight into the country - any well researched Westerner would have written something similar.

What bugs me about this book is the flat characters of the main women and how easy it is to tug a heartstring with a recipe of abused women, families shattered, love lost and brave, tragic children - all without much creativity, character interest or any sort of plot beyond what one would expect from Eastenders.

It's not awful, but I wouldn't recommend it unless you love being emotionally wrenched (and are therefore probably a teenage girl :> )

3.0 out of 5 stars