Let's Bust a Recap : A House Without Windows

Alright, after recapping my most recently read book on Monday, we're taking it all the way back to the book that's been waiting the longest for a recap. I read A House Without Windows in August last year after drawing it out of the TBR Jar. I picked this book up at my local library's annual sale a few years back when they were doing their $5 box day, and I have no idea when I actually would have gotten around to reading it if I hadn't pulled this title out of my TBR Jar last year. Much like I approached The Beekeeper of Aleppo with a bit of trepidation, I faced the opening sentences of A House Without Windows with some apprehension. What are the odds I pull two books featuring areas known for ongoing conflict and unrest? But that's what happened and as it turned out, I spoke too soon when I said we should all read The Beekeeper of Aleppo instead of The Kite Runner. A House Without Windows is the more appropriate replacement due to the fact that both books are written by Afghan American doctors and feature Afghani stories. Consider this my official revision of my original statement and wholehearted endorsement that we should all be reading Nadia Hashimi instead of Khaled Hosseini. (And no, I will never let this go: I hated The Kite Runner so much.)

A House Without Windows was published in 2016 and is Hashimi's third international best-seller. In the opening pages, we meet Zeba who is found in a catatonic state, covered in her husband's blood, next to his body with a hatchet in his back. She is immediately taken to Kabul's women's prison, and her young children are taken to her husband's family. We also meet idealistic Yusuf, an Afghan-born but American-raised lawyer ready to return to his native home and do some good there. When he is assigned Zeba's case, his client is nothing like what he expects and when she won't speak to him, he doesn't know how to handle her case. As Zeba slowly befriends other women at the prison, many of them there for "love crimes", they begin to wonder if she has her mother's power of jadu, and they start to confide their hopes for their futures in her. As Yusuf struggles to get to the bottom of what really happened to Zeba's husband Kamal, he also has to contend with his American sense of justice and face the reality that he may not be able to bring any meaningful change to his war-torn homeland.

This story was beautiful and heart-wrenching all at once. Hashimi deftly weaves together the many threads in her narrative in a gentle way that opens the reader's eyes to the plight of Afghani women without dragging you down into miry despair. I was intrigued by the murder mystery aspect which kept me turning the pages right to the end, and I appreciated the way Hashimi ended on a hopeful note without compromising the reality of life for women in Afghanistan. While the actual details of the murder are hard to stomach, Hashimi handles her difficult content delicately with a skilled hand. This story has stayed with me since turning the final page several months ago. 

Reading A House Without Windows and The Beekeeper of Aleppo last year really broadened my horizons. Coming face to face with the realities women contend with in these conflict-ridden regions made me so profoundly grateful for my own reality of growing up in the United States where I am free and respected as a human being, equal to the other humans around me. These are the reasons I try to diversify my reading, and those instincts were rewarded by these two excellent novels. I highly recommend both. I even bought Hashimi's debut novel on a recent trip to my favorite secondhand bookstore, and I look forward to reading it soon.

Why do you read? What books have opened your eyes to something you will probably never experience in your own life?

Let's Bust a Recap : The Kite Runner

Oh y'all. I know this book was a #1 New York Times bestseller for over two years. I know all the reviews are stellar. I know everyone thinks it's so powerful and important and real. 

But I hated it. I really, really, really did not like it at all. Maybe reading it right after reading Night was not my finest decision and maybe that somehow affected my reaction, but I will not be picking up any more of Hosseini's books.

The Kite Runner was published in 2003 and is the first of Khaled Hosseini's three novels. After the success of this novel, Hosseini quit his career in medicine to become a writer full-time. 

The Kite Runner is about a boy named Amir and his horrible life. Like seriously, his life is just awful from pretty much the beginning of the book to the end. When you have a story filled to the brim with child rape, dysfunctional father/son relationships, the ravages of war, profanity, senseless executions, misplaced hope in an empty religion, child suicide, and let's just throw in infertility and nearly impossible inter-country adoptions for good measure, you have a story I don't want any part of. 

I've been processing this book and my reaction to it for weeks now and trying to pinpoint exactly why I am so strongly against it. Arguments that people have given me in defense of this book include the "realness" of it, the "redemptive" qualities in it, the attention it draws to a country and region that is in such constant and seemingly endless turmoil. I guess I can get where people are coming from. Maybe. A little. I wrote just last week on this very blog that I think it's important to read about the depths human depravity can reach, to educate ourselves, to remember. Knowledge is power. 

But this story is fiction. And I think my intense distaste for this book stems from the knowledge that these awful things do happen in real life. So why do we want to make up more bad stories with sad, hopeless endings and read them? Do you know what I mean? There's enough horror and tragedy in this world without creating more of it. I personally didn't find any redemptive qualities in this book. It was depressing to the very last word. I can't feel good about characters who have suffered through the very worst of human wickedness and have no higher eternal hope at the end of the story. That's not a good read for me. 

I read this book because of all its accolades and because friends whose literary opinions I trust recommended it to me. But I can't personally recommend it. The writing itself wasn't anything extraordinary or earth-shattering, and I was sorry I read it. Good luck to you if you decide to.