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Abigail Flynn

Ms. Baditoi

(H) English 9 - 2B

5 May 2017

Running from the Past: A Review of The Kite Runner

Amir gasps, opening his mouth as wide as he can, struggling for a breath of air. The

pitch black interior of the oil tanker feels suffocating, and the air seems solid. Amir and his

fellow passengers know they must persevere because this oil tanker is their ticket to freedom.

When the Soviets took control of Afghanistan, Amir and his father left everything they knew to

pursue a new life in America. In The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini tells the story of Amirs life

and his struggle to find inner peace.

The novel begins with the story of two young boys, the wealthy Amir and his servant

Hassan. They share a special friendship and seem inseparable. When Amir and his father move

to California, he wants to start over but he can never escape his past and never forgets Hassan.

The story shows how Afghanistan went through numerous transitions of power and how it

affects the two boys throughout their lives. The insightful perspective provided by Hosseini

makes The Kite Runner a fascinating and heartbreaking read.

Everyone should read The Kite Runner because it is one of a kind, emotionally powerful,

and very informative. As the first fictitious book written about the turmoil in Afghanistan for a

Western audience, this novel gives an important issue the attention it deserves. Hosseini does a

wonderful job of telling a historically accurate tale from a very personal perspective. Bob

Corbett, a philosophy professor at Webster University, summed up many peoples feelings

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toward the book, Before this novel I had never given Afghanistan much thought, following

only the broadest patterns of its political history in the past 20 years. But Hosseini forces us to

see the Afghans to be like everyone else humans, complex, both defined and crippled by

tradition, but no more or less so than anyone else (Corbett). Hosseini makes a very distant

conflict seem extremely real and personal by diving deeper than just faceless pictures of the

Taliban. As senior reporter for The Guardian Amelia Hill explains perfectly, It is a history that

can intimidate and exhaust an outsider's attempts to understand, but Hosseini extrudes it simply

and quietly into an intimate account of love, honour, guilt, fear and redemption that needs no dry

history book or atlas to grip and absorb (Hill). The emotional connection readers achieve with

the conflict and the characters truly sets this book apart.

The Kite Runner held the number one spot on the Bestseller list for four weeks and stayed

on it for 240 weeks. This novel has won awards like the ALA Notable Book Award and the

Boeke Prize (Hosseini). The novel deserves all of these awards and has won many more. A

heart wrenching story set in a war-torn landscape provides the perfect recipe for an amazing

novel. In The Kite Runner, Hosseini brings an important topic to light while exploring the inner

struggle of a man trying to escape his past.

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Works Cited

Corbett, Bob. "The Kite Runner." Book Review -- Khaled Hosseini THE KITE RUNNER.

Webster University, May 2006. Web. 26 Apr. 2017.

Hill, Amelia. "Observer Review: The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini." The Observer. Guardian

News and Media, 06 Sept. 2003. Web. 25 Apr. 2017.

Hosseini, Khaled. "Book Facts." Khaled Hosseini. N.p., 2017. Web. 26 Apr. 2017.