Khaled Hosseini has me as a fan; in fact, he'll probably join my buy-the-hardback-as-soon-as-it's-published group of authors. I had already read and liked A Thousand Smiling Suns—with a slight reservation about its ending. I have no reservations about anything in Hosseini's first book, The Kite Runner. The plot moves and even at the end when I was starting to think, "OK, let's wrap it up," Hosseini throws in a final plot twist—totally unexpected and totally believable. Damn! I wish I had an imagination that worked that way. Oh, well. The best I can do is marvel when I see it in others.
As with any book I really like, there were sentences that jumped up and slapped me across the face.
1) The narrator believes himself to be a disappointment to his gregarious and powerful father. In one scene he, the narrator, overhears a conversation between his father and a friend, during which the friend says, "Children aren't coloring books. You don't get to fill them in with your favorite colors." (page 21) Isn't that great? Don't you wish more parents felt that way? I was lucky; mine did. They didn't even flinch when the colleges I applied to included one mentioned in a dedication in a YA book and another because it had the same name as the motel in Psycho. Don't know if I could have been that hands-off if I'd tried parenting.
2) At one point the narrator thinks, "…that's the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too." (page 55) You mean they don't?
3) A bit of dialogue occurs between a soldier and the narrator's father while they make their escape from Afghanistan. The soldier says, "There is no shame in war." The father responds, "Tell him he's wrong. War doesn't negate decency. It demands it, even more than in times of peace." (page 115) Which is why Abu Ghraib and the prison at Guantanamo were/are so very, very bad—IMHO, of course.
And I've decided to ignore the one thing I'm pretty sure is a mistake. Towards the end the narrator is severely beaten. The doctor warns him of a few things, one being that "you will be talking like Al Pacino from the first Godfather movie for a little while." (page 295) Now I'm not willing to rewatch The Godfather I to prove my case, but I'm willing to bet dollars to donuts that he meant Marlon Brando. At least I don't remember Pacino talking funny. Did he?
Bottom line: if you haven't already read The Kite Runner, do so. It's really, really good.
