I am quite conflicted about what I think about this book. The third in the series, following on from The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, And the Mountains Echoed takes on the same ideas of siblings separated at birth and the ripples that causes and the searching that ensues.

There were many things I admired in this book. I have always enjoyed the depiction of Afghanistan in Hosseini’s writing and this book is no different. We see it through several generations as it changes, is at war and as money arrives. We see the cultural clashes between those living a more traditional life in poverty out in the vast rural areas and the more westernised city people who have proabably lived abroad at some point in their lives, the effect aid and charity workers have on rental prices and then the drugs money.

Poverty drives the action for much of this book. A father sells his daughter to a wealthy couple in Kabul who are unable to have children together. The daughter, Pari, is young and we are expecting it because the book opens with a traditional tale of a div or demon that visits villages and takes children away. When eventually someone goes searching for them, they find them living in what could be called paradise, happy, well-fed and playing, leaving the parents in torment. Would the child be better off left where it is? So, we know the track this book is on. The searching for a sibling, but if that is a track, this story is shunted into many sidelines and diversions because as we move through the generations, more and more people become involved whether they were aware of the initial incident or not. This is a really clever way to show the ripples of effect on a family and those who know them.

Eventually, there is a reuniting when the siblings are much older and both are living in other countries. There is a definite theme running through the book of the effect of war, the Taliban and poverty on the people and thos who can, leave. It then becomes a story of the diaspora, the feeling of wanting to return and give something back. Here Hosseini plays with us with two men, both now living in America, one a doctor and the other more like a used-car salesman, Timur. They both travel back to Afghanistan and find themselves visiting a young girl with a severe deformity. The doctor visits her daily and promises to get her the surgery she needs. When he returns to America he feels the materialism of his life as a cinema room is built onto his house. The young girl fades from his mind and his half-hearted attempt to bring her to America for surgery fails at the first hurdle. It turns out that his dodgy cousin, full of talk and ego, does manage to enable her to have surgery and so our perceptions of what we might imagine happening are manipulated.

In fact there are several characters who are in pairs to provide contrast, or individual characters who show us opposing sides of themselves. The book also uses different points of view to expand what we can see and to show us how various characters feel. There are interviews and letters/postcards and so this book is filled to the brim with devices to enable the story to be told. Too many? Possibly.

There is much mention of beauty in the book, particularly in people and then there is deformity in others. This contrasting is quite obvious but it’s role in the book is less clear and I couldn’t follow that idea through as being important to the story. And the title? I find that hard to link in to the story unless sound waves are being used in the same way as ripples. Ripples, though, are not the same as an echo which is something repeated again and again until it fades away. What in this book is echoing other than the trauma which this country has and still is enduring? The title is a quote from William Blake’s Nurse’s Song and I struggle to make it fit. I understand that the whole of the series of poems is about innocence and then the corruption of this and that fits better. So is it the corruption of people and life that is echoing in this book? Or poverty and wealth? Or about the loss of innocence in children? Or all of those things?

Let me know what you think.