Thursday, Dec 4, 2008

Book Review: The Kite Runner

I Love Baba!

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For the Book Awards II Challenge and Lit Flicks Challenge, I read The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. 

The Review:

Title:  The Kite Runner

Author:  Khaled Hosseini

Author’s Website:  http://www.khaledhosseini.com

Publisher:  Riverhead Books, Published by The Penguin Group

Publisher’s Website:  www.penguin.com & www.riverheadbooks.com

Type:  Fiction

Number of Pages:  371 paperback

ISBN #: 1-57322-245-3

This is the story of a man’s journey to right the biggest wrong of his past.  This is also the story of a country and a culture that has died and shall never be resurrected to what it once was.  This story is about holding onto traditions and customs in a new country and a new life.  This is a story about honor and bravery.  Simply, this is a GREAT story.

I am hoping that, by now, many or most of you have read this amazing book.  It is a great story, but it is also a sad story, in my opinion.  The story is about a boy, Amir, and his life in Afghanistan and later in the United States of America.  Amir’s father, Baba, is, BY FAR, my favorite character in the book.  He is a man of great honor and pride.  He is a man who seemed larger than life, to Amir.  Amir is not the brave, strong man that his father, Baba is.  As such, he carries such a great amount of shame for falling less than what he believes are his father’s expectations of him.    My review will not outline the storyline of this book/movie, rather touch on what I saw were the differences between the movie and the book, due to the Lit Flicks Challenge.

• I believe, in order to try to condense the story into a reasonable timeframe for a movie, there were a considerable amount of critical parts of the story that were left out of the movie.  I understand Hollywood and their need to package up movies into a certain timeframe… but, I think that cutting out the majority of Amir’s time in the middle east was a disservice to the movie watchers who did not read the book.   Specifically, the amount of time that Amir spent in hospitals and what Sohrab had to go through while Amir recovered was, for me, a very important part of the story.
• The casting of Baba disappointed me.  I LOVE BABA and I pictured him in my mind as this big, towering, powerful man.  The actor who portrayed Baba was WAY TOO SHORT and diminutive for my liking.  Although, I must say that he did a fine job and played the role well. 
• The movie neglected to show more about the struggling that Baba and Amir went through in the United States.
• The movie really shortchanged the viewers on how Amir fell in love with Soraya.
• The part of the book where they travel inside the gas tank of the truck to escape Afghanistan is not shown in the movie as it was written in the book.  That travel had so much impact on Amir and they don’t properly reflect in the movie what happened in there.
• I was also disappointed in the casting of Amir.  He didn’t “fit the bill” for me.  He was a good actor and did a good job, but I wanted somebody a little more rugged.
• I did like to be able to view the physical difference in the Hazara boys, as it was hard to visualize in my mind but easier to understand in the movie.

In the event that you haven’t read the book, nor seen the movie… I recommend the book first and the movie second.  This doesn’t surprise me because that’s how I usually feel.  However, you will appreciate the movie so much more… by the way, the movie is done in subtitles for the majority of the film.  Hosseini makes a cameo appearance at the end of the movie in the park scene.  I couldn’t focus on the movie at that point because I was so busy watching him… silly me!

Oh, there are A LOT of foreign language words in this book.  I had a friend who helped me to translate them.  If you read the book first, you may want to have the internet handy to check the meaning of certain words… it adds a lot to the story.  Also, some knowledge on the Russian invasion of Afghanistan and The Taliban rule in Afghanistan would be helpful.

Sher’s “Out of Ten” Scale:

Once I had a better understanding of the history, the area, and the language, I was gobbling up this book.  I absolutely LOVED it.  I actually thought that it was a true story when I was reading it (silly me).  Especially with our for men and women fighting over there, I think that it’s a book that we should all pick up and read, if we can.  We are so fortunate to be Americans (well, that is for the American readers of this post… I know I’ve got some readers from other countries, too!).  So, I am giving it a 9.5 out of 10. 

On the Library Thing & Amazon.Com Rating:  ♥♥♥♥♥

Where To Buy The Book:

Click here to purchase this book for $10.20 at Amazon.Com

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