A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

I hated the book. I'll grant the author has a talent for story telling and for creating characters, but for this one I can only assume that he made a list of all the horrible things that could happen to a female in Afghanistan and then outlined a novel to include every one of them. It feels like propaganda to me. I've read personal accounts by Afghani women where the story is what happened to them. That's honest. I've read articles about woman under the Taliban with some egregious examples. That's honest. But this novel is dishonest. It takes advantages of people's desire to read about atrocity after atrocity and it assumes that readers in English are so uninformed about Afghanistan that they can't get information except when it's also “entertainment”.

It strikes me as having a lot in common with Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which is also propaganda, but has still outlived lots of others written at the time. I’ve read Uncle Tom’s Cabin and found it compelling and memorable, but I’d never call it a great novel.