And The Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini – Book Review

And The Mountains Echoed is the third book by New York Times bestselling author Khaled Hoesseini. It is as good as his previous 2 books. I started reading this book and I immedietly fell in love with it.

This book is about how we love, how we care for each other and how the choices we make affects others.

This story has many stories within it, which make up one big story. It is about an unbreakable bond between a brother and sister, a love/hate relationship between sisters, a bonding relashionship between an owner and chauffeur, a relationship between cousins and many such.

The book starts of with a dad narrating a story to his children. The story he narrates is about a farmer who works very hard to make ends meet. He is forced to give up one of his five children to an evil giant. His wife and him decide to choose randomly and the unfortunate one happens to be his favorite son.

The farmer, eventually, tracks down the giant and finds his son in a flourishing garden full of happy children, without any knowledge of hs birth family. The farmer, who is unable to invoke the will from this place of luxury back to his own dry, hopeless land, leaves without his beloved son. As a deed of goodwill, the giant gives the farmer a potion that makes him forget all about his son.

This story relates to rest of the novel. To what extent should parents go to save their children from a life of pain. Is being torn from one’s family a better destiny than living in poverty?

Ten-year-old Abdullah lives in a small village in Afghanistan with his hardworking father, step-mother and step-brother, while his 3-year-old sister, Pari, who he loves dearly is adopted by a wealthy couple, Suleiman and Nila Wahdati. Eventually Pari is taken away by her half-French mother, a poet, to live a modern life in Paris. Hosseini narrates all the stories connected to this story. Some of these stories begin earlier such as the kids’ mom dieing after giving birth to Pari, and their father’s following marriage to a woman with heap of guilt over family betrayal.

But most of the story lines speeds forward in thr trail of the family’s parting. The lives of Pari and Abduallah and a third half-brother, Iqbal, remarkably different, in ways that not only accentuate impermanence of destiny but its profound partiality in a world in which the helpless suffer lot more than an insider of the more fortunate classes.

When the Kabul house is deserted by Pari’s adoptive parents, and turned into a hospital, we meet a Greek doctor who has spend his life to help the wretched Afghanistan. Yet, he is unable to get near his lonely mother. We also follow the story of two Afghan brothers, who grew up near the Kabul house. When they emigrate to America, each has to decide how courageous a role to play in the endless suffering of their country.

But it’s Pari and Abdullah’s situation, living separately yet tied together by the tender, fraternal care he took of her as child, that makes the novel most interesting.

In the fable their father narrates to them, the little boy who was taken by the giant wore a bell around his neck. When the father forgets about his son because of the potion he drank, he still thinks he can hear the sound of the bell. He doesn’t understand “why a wave of something, something like the tail end of a sad dream, always swept through him whenever he heard the jingling.”

You may find that Abdullah and Pari’s story stays with an impact alike that ‘wave of something.

My opinions

One of the best story books I’ve read. Absolutely love it! I’m looking forward to reading other books by Khaled Hosseini. It has lots of twists in it!

Genre

• Drama
• History

My Favourite Character

My favourite character was Abdullah because he took the time and effort to take care of his sister even though he was very young himself.