I've just finished reading
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, and it is a glorious and beautiful book.
And depressing as hell, despite the fact that it ends on a light note (compared to the rest of the book).
It is the type of book that should make you cry, the type of book that you can't stand to put down, except you must because all of sudden everything that happens to the characters becomes too much to bear and you can't stand reading it any longer. And then you go right back to it only half and hour later.
There are no really truly strong female characters, though Soroya comes close. But that's okay, because it's about the male characters, and lets face it, you only really have two female characters who are actually alive through the course of the story. That, and the Afghani culture that does prevail throughout the book, which seems so familiar and yet so strange at the same time.
Khaled Hosseini has a golden tongue with which he writes a most fantastic story that seems utterly and completely true, because how could it not? The main character is flawed in the most humanistic and realistic ways possible, and the supporting cast is viewed through the narrator's eye, and Hosseini never breaks that perspective. And so the book is so utterly real, it is almost a relief that
The Kite Runners is a piece of fiction, while breaking your heart that Amir does not exist except in paper.