And the Mountains Echoed question

A beautifully told story of love, life and relationships. I loved the beautiful language and the wonderful stories. The characters, their relationships, their life struggles, their triumphs and tragedies were real. Never once did I day, "this would not / could not happen in real life." And once again, the language / prose was sooooo beautiful! Yes, it was sometimes difficult to figure out the relationship of each chapter and its characters to the ones that preceded it. But, for me it was kind of fun, a puzzle. I truly enjoyed this book and found it thoroughly engaging.

I found the multitude of characters confusing for a large part of the book but by the end they all flowed together making a complete story for me. I do agree that a couple of them could have been left out but I'm sure each was important to Hosseini.

I liked this book but didn't love it, which makes me sad. I wanted it to be longer, richer, more poignant. Felt a bit see through and trite. Ugh. Feel horrible saying that but just didn't have the depth and scale that I was hoping for. The number of characters was fine but their stories weren't fleshed out and it felt rushed. So.....bit of a let down. Sorry.

There are many stories that span years, or have many characters. I am thinking of Tolkien, Ken Follett for starters. I never felt I needed a score card to keep up with these books. Maybe what was missing was a focus. A wheel has to have a center and an axis to turn.
Hosseini's keeps getting better. I can't fault the writing, just the structure. It kept me from enjoying the book completely.

I thought of this book more as a short story collection rather that a regular novel. I didn't really have any trouble connecting things, but I can understand why other people would.

I didn't have a problem keeping track of the who's and where's in this book but I didn't like his use of too many characters. Hosseini's gift is storytelling and character development. By reading page after page, he makes you fall in love with his characters.

When he chopped up this book into sections and made it read like a set of short stories, no matter how interconnected the characters were, he ruins that special bond you feel between yourself and whatever character you grew attached to from the beginning.

Description of every character and relationship among them was so nicely depicted that you do not have to keep the note but it will come by itself. Yes..each one character had his own story and it was an emotional uplift while reading them. I liked the book as much as other two written by him.

It wasn't that difficult, but yeah there are too many stories in it and therefore too many characters. But then that is the beauty of this book. All the dots connected so beautifully by the end of the book.

At the beginning it was slightly difficult to follow due to the number of characters, which is why I did not initially enjoy reading it however as I carried on, I was able to follow it more easily. At the end, instead of being annoyed at the amount of characters, I really appreciated how all the characters lives were interwoven to make this beautiful book and made me appreciate how one event has a domino effect on so many different lives, in a small or large way.

I think there were a few characters that were not really required and the author could have worked the novel just fine without them. i felt Pari being the protagonist could have been given more story time.
Hosseini is amazing with emotions and theres no two words to that. This book proves that an ounce better. My favourite character is Nabi.

I'm glad to see others think this. I thought that any of the characters/plot lines in this novel could've made a great book on their own, but all put together, it made for a very unfocused novel that left too many unresolved issues.

The way it started was beautifully. I did get confused a couple of times but written beautifully. It disappointed me and bored me, though.

There were more characters than I expected, but I didn't have an issue with it. I didn't like that the book ended with too many unanswered questions. (I wanted to know the details of why Pari's adoptive mom was barren, for one.) I wasn't a huge fan of the ending, either. Not a bad book, but definitely the worst of the three he's written. Regardless, I will still read anything he writes, I just hope the next one is more in the style of KR & ATSS.

I listened to this on Audio and got completely confused with all the characters.....I ended up stopping listening because I was lost.

Not at all was it confusing! The opposite - the story is rich with different people, different characters, fates, specializations... they are all so different and it's such a great pleasure to meet so many people scattered thousands of miles away from Afghan ardent deserts to coquette Parisian cafes and American Big homes and all arranged lives again back to cozy white Greek island.

I did get confused a bit with all the characters and had to keep checking back to the dates at the start of the chapters to keep the timeline straight. I so wanted these different characters to cross paths and have AHA moments so that everyone could have lived happily ever after. That is not how real life works however, and the book would not have been so tremendous had everything worked out perfectly for everyone. I think the characters were all needed in the book to give the right amount of layers between them so that those AHA moments could not happen.

Tala wrote: "Yes! At one point I thought about writing all the characters down in order not to get confused."

I don't think it's because of the usage of many characters, but mostly because every character's story started from the middle and it was not explained who is this? who is that? what are they talking about? until later in the pages.

Excellent book. All the characters were necessary. While I had a hard time working through the violence, that was the pallet which produced the final picture. Five stars.

I had been told that keeping track of the many characters was a bit of a daunting task so I felt that I was prepared. I didn't write them down but was able to keep them straight in my head. Having said that though I do agree there were a lot of characters. I really liked how all the characters were interwoven with each other. Excellent read.

I had absolutely no trouble following the story. All the stories and characters were absolutely necessary to this book, and made it one that could have gone on forever, save one story. The only part that I felt didn't belong was the story about the girl who suffered the axe wound to her head, and the help promised but not delivered. While it was touching and heartbreaking, it was far too tangential to belong with the rest of the book.

I agree that the characters are way too much. Many of them has this "unfinished business" and I don't know what happen to them at the end of the book.

Loved the way each character's life was threaded through this rich tapestry to make a unique and whole story.

I've read this book twice now. I didn't really have a problem remembering who was who; in fact, I loved how the book spanned generations so gracefully and told a beautiful, albeit a little inconsequential, story. Khaled Hosseini really has that ability to make the most banal of everyday tasks look magnificent through his use of words.

I totally had to keep a list of all the characters and how they were related. I thought it was a great read though. He's a master story teller.

i agree with everyone. the book was confusing. most books now do the jumping back and forth but this one too many characters doing the jumping back and forth.

I really liked this book, although I agree the characters did get a bit confusing at times. I was trying to remember where the connections to the original story were made. And I agree, it did not wow me as well as the others, but then again not everything he writes will be another Kite Runner.

The character that i thought was Abdullah grown up was chapter seven Baba jan, that i thought was confusing otherwise great read like all of his other ones.

This book was so disappointing to me after his last two 5 star books.

I'm halfway through the book, but i'm sure it will be satisfying in the end, just like his other two books :)!

Thr number of characters where too confusing for me! I found it so confusing that I had to re-start the book after I had gotten past a couple of pages of the book.

The number of characters was overwhelming at the beginning, but I could through it in the end. They were beautifully intricate :)

It's not such much that there were a lot of characters, it's that I didn't care about a lot of those characters. This novel was not as good as his previous efforts.