From the Bookshelf of Appomattox Regional Library System…

[close] Khaled Hosseini needs no introduction. This Afghan-American novelist sold millions of copies of his first two books, "The Kite Runner" and "A Thousand Splendid Suns." His third novel, "And the Mountains Echoed" is due to be published May 21 2013. Which gets us to a problem: I have read an advance copy of this book and I was not as thrilled with it as I was with his first two.

It is rather hard to explain the problems that I have with this novel. Part of the problem is one of expectation- a Hosseini book just has to be great! But part of it is the lack of focus. Hosseini chooses here to tell a story that spans over fifty years, beginning with a poor family in rural Afghanistan, then expanding to cover many lives which crossed the path of that family, and ending with a sort of bittersweet reunion. We get to meet so many characters that each individual character has a pretty limited time on the stage, with the result that many readers will not form the passionate attachments that occurred with his first two novels.

It is worth mentioning that Hosseini's choice to explore the emigrant community of Afghans is a sort of tacit admission that his American audience is suffering from a sort of Afghanistan fatigue, with Bin Laden dead and the American military involvement there winding down. His novel is almost a plea for the reader to not forget about this distant land and a people who have suffered so much in the past thirty years. In some cases, that plea may not be heeded by readers today.

In summary, this new novel features Hosseini's trademark compassion for his ancestral land and people, but may possess less appeal for today's readers. Some of the reasons for this are outside of the author, while some do rest with him.