Okay, so I don’t think that this was necessarily a bad book, and I can see that Khaled Hosseini’s heart was in the right place in his writing of it... But I just did not vibe with this at all.
I really did consider DNF’ing several times because I was struggling to read it, and not because it was a ‘difficult but important subject’, but because I felt that the representation of women’s suffering was seriously mishandled.
The characterisation was very poor, particularly between the two main protagonists. Both of them are pretty interchangeable as they have no defining traits or individual perceptions of the world. They are just empty vessels for traumatic events to happen to, and although this influences their decisions later in the book, the first two thirds are incredibly flat.
The (specifically female) trauma that is present in this book is also mishandled. I do think that there is a fine line between explicitly describing trauma to inform the experiences of the characters, and explicitly describing trauma out of a desire to raise a feeling of disgust in the audience (i.e. trauma porn). It really felt like Hosseini was leaning into the latter, which might have been appropriate for a horror novel, or a novel NOT based in real and recent history, but under the circumstances, really felt like capitalising off of women’s suffering.
I also felt that the writing style was inappropriate for the subject matter. Hosseini has adopted, whether intentionally or not, a pretty straightforward and non-descriptive prose style, and although I understand that the scope of the story meant that every detail of the protagonists’ lives could not be covered, there was a lot of superfluous information included that I personally would have cut in favour of, hmmm, I don’t know, a look at the actual mental repercussions of the physical, emotional, and sexual trauma that took place within this book? Seriously, we would get a SINGLE SENTENCE about how (for example) a protagonist was raped as a child by a much older man, and how she was in physical pain because of it, and then it would NEVER. BE. MENTIONED. AGAIN. It honestly felt like the women’s reactions (short and long term) to a lot of these things happening to them was akin to ‘wow, that sucked. Oh, well. Moving on.’ and that angered me so much. I wanted to throw the book across the room at the end of Mariam’s story when, after processing none of her trauma she just peace’s out, perfectly content. Nah, fuck off.
So, if you’re going to write a story about women’s pain, maybe actually focus on the women’s pain part, ya’ know?