If you read my blog posts regularly, you’ll find out that I’m a family girl. I’m close with my siblings, parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. Even though I now live a 20-hour drive away, I still make time to fly up at least once a year to visit.
This year, I’ve seen a lot of my family. My parents visited me in January. Ten of us just went to a beach resort in Maine to vacation together. This past weekend, I was in Ohio visiting family and attending my cousin’s wedding. Family plays a large role in my life.
And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini is a story about family. It starts out with two siblings, Abdullah and Pari, who live in a small Afghanistan village and are as close as a brother and sister can be. When Pari is 3 years old she is sold to a family in Kabul that her uncle works for. Because she’s so small, Pari soon forgets about her past family and her identity becomes tied to her new adoptive parents.
When Pari’s father is taken ill, her dramatic and ill-suited mother takes her to France to raise her alone. Pari is under the impression that her father has died and does her best to fit in to her new neighborhood in her new school. She soon forgets about Afghanistan and actually forgets how to speak in Farsi, preferring French like her mother.
Abdullah never recovers from the loss of his sister and as an adult ends up a refugee in Pakistan with his half-brother Iqbal. Eventually Abdullah seeks asylum in the States and he opens an Afghani restaurant and raises a daughter he names Pari. Pari knows that she is named after Abdullah’s lost sister and feels as if she has a subtle connection to her absent aunt.
Iqbal also has a family, but stays in Pakistan until he comes home to Afghanistan with his son only to realize that his hometown has been transformed and the place where is house stood is now the home to a drug lord. He tries to reason with the drug lord to receive compensation for his homeland, but is eventually defeated.
When Abdullah becomes ill with dementia, Pari puts her life on hold to care for him. She receives a phone call from her lost aunt and eventually brother and sister are united once more, though Abdullah is no longer able to recognize her.
This story is a series of fragmented stories that eventually overlap with one another through connections between the main characters of each story. Some of the main characters of the stories are left hanging. For instance, we don’t know what happens to the son of the drug lord or the plastic surgeon’s childhood friend. Some stories don’t seem to fit at first, but keep reading because eventually you’ll see the connection. It’s a complex story, but what family isn’t a little complicated? I give this book 4 stars and recommend it to anyone who enjoys stories about cultural roots or family issues.
Did you enjoy this book? Why or why not?
