The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

Date finished: 5 April 2014

I have to study this for English and let me tell you, I don't agree with "don't judge a book by its cover" one little bit. Just looking at the cover when my teacher handed me a copy, I knew that I was not going to enjoy this book. And I was right. To be fair, I hate any text I've studied in English, but this book didn't even interest me at all.

For a start, how am I, a sixteen year old white girl in New Zealand, supposed to relate to a young boy in 1970s Afghanistan? I couldn't sympathise with Amir, I didn't get his culture, I didn't really get him. I knew all this by the second chapter. Interesting setting and character are the two things I look for in a novel, and I was deprived of these. So I wasn't exactly hooked by the beginning.

For the whole first hundred or so pages, I was waiting and waiting for something to happen. The narrator's way of recounting every little detail about his childhood slowed down the novel to an unbearable pace. When I read a book, I need action, not a character's memories that will become totally irrelevant later on. The story in general was boring and I predicted that Amir would marry Soraya as soon as she was introduced, and I knew that he would adopt Sohrab as soon as it was mentioned that Hassan had a son. One of the other English teachers at school said that there are "so many plot twists" in The Kite Runner. So I read it anticipating those. There were literally two.

In short, I'm glad that I didn't expect anything great from this book. I would have been extremely let down if I had. I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone - in fact, I would recommend that you don't read it. Why it has a 4.20 average rating on Goodreads I will never know.