The Kite Runner

Title: The Kite Runner

Author: Khaled Hosseini

Genre:

The story is about two friends, Amir, the main character who narrates the story, and Hassan, his best friend and servant. Although they do not know it when the story begins, Amir and Hassan are actually half-brothers by the same father, Baba, who lies to hide a secret affair he had with his servant's wife. His servant is Ali, and since Baba had an affair with Ali's wife, Hassan is his son, but Ali doesn't know it, so he thinks Hassan is his son. Hassan is an ethnic Hazara and a Shi'a Muslim, and since he is the servant of Baba, he and his father, Ali, do all the chores in the house. Meanwhile, Amir, the main character, is Pashtun. Although Hassan is Amir's servant and is a Hazara (a type of Muslim who is usually discriminated against), both of them are the best of friends and never separate from each other. They both grew up together, and both of their mothers died. When Amir and Hassan run into Assef, a tall and strong blond, blue-eyed Pashtun who was known for bullying so many other kids with his infamous brass knuckles, he threatens to beat them up mostly because Hassan was a Hazara and Amir shouldn't be friends with a Hazara. Hassan appears from behind Amir with his slingshot and threatens to shoot Assef's left eye if he does not leave them alone.

In the wintertime in Kabul, neighborhood children compete in a kite fighting tournament where kite fighters position their glass string to cut rival kites out of the sky. Kite runners chase the last kite of a tournament, a coveted trophy. When Amir and Hassan win the kite fighting tournament in the winter of 1975, Amir and Hassan are briefly separated in the frenzy of celebration because Hassan went to go and chase down the last kite they cut down; this was a tradition that all the kids usually did the last kite cut down was always stressed. Whoever caught the falling kite will get to keep it. When Hassan catches the kite after a long chase with a lot of other boys behind him. Assef, the bully, sees this and corners him in an alleyway with his other two friends. Assef tells  Hassan to give the kite to him, and he will forget about the threat that Hassan made before when they ran into each other. Hassan said no because he didn't want to disappoint Amir. So Assef makes his friends pin Hassan down, and he rapes him. Meanwhile, Amir watched the whole scene play out and didn't help Hassan feel that Assef would do the same to him or even beat him up.

Unable to cope with the guilt, Amir distances himself from Hassan. However, Hassan and his father, Ali, are constantly present as they clean and tend to the grounds of Baba's home. As Amir's guilt becomes more painful because Hassan doesn't tell anybody or talk about what happened, he frames Hassan for stealing his watch that Baba bought for his birthday, a sin Baba has told him is the worst of all sins. When Baba confronts Ali and Hassan about the stolen contraband, Amir is shocked to hear Hassan confess to the theft even though he never did it. Hassan's false confession is his final act of loyalty to Amir. Despite Baba's immediate forgiveness, Ali says that living in Baba's home has become impossible. Although Baba begs and cries for them to stay, Baba and Amir never see Ali or Hassan again. 

Years later, Amir and Baba flee Afghanistan because of a destructive Russian invasion in the 1980s, moving to California. A few years later, Amir has finished college and is now a grown man. He is a published writer with a loving wife, Soraya. Amir and Soraya tried multiple times to have a baby, but each time, it didn't work, and they started to think of adoption. Baba died at an old age because of an illness. In 2001, Amir learned from Baba's friend Rahim Khan and business partner who started Amir's passion for writing that Hassan and his family returned to Baba's house in the late 1980s but were executed by the Taliban, making his young son Sohrab an orphan. When Rahim Khan tells Amir that Hassan is his half-brother, Amir decides he has no other choice but to journey back to Kabul to retrieve his nephew. 

Amir returns to Kabul and finds that the Afghanistan of his childhood has been turned into a dangerous war zone patrolled by dangerous Taliban extremists. He learns Sohrab has been trafficked and sold into sex work, purchased by a brutal Taliban official who regularly preys on children at a run-down warehouse converted into an orphanage. Amir's guide arranges a meeting with the Taliban official, bringing Amir face to face with an old nemesis, Assef, the Taliban official, who believes he has been chosen by God to ethnically purify Afghanistan. Amir offers to pay for Sohrab, but Assef doesn't allow it, stating that he can leave with Sohrab only after they fight to the death. In the struggle, Amir is gravely wounded, but Sohrab saves him with a slingshot that he fires into Assef's left eye. 

After Amir recovers in a hospital, he promises Sohrab he will not allow him to go back to an orphanage. However, the legal path to bringing Sohrab to the United States is complicated. Amir decides his best chance at leaving Afghanistan with Sohrab is to place him in an orphanage and file a petition. Sohrab is frantic at the news. They go too bad after Sohrab crying on Amir's shoulder for a while. After, in the middle of the night, Amir gets a call from an immigration lawyer and learns that he can petition Sohrab's visa after he arrives in America. So happy, Amir rushes to tell Sohrab the good news. He didn't find Sohrab in bed, but he found him in the bathroom in the bathtub full of water, with a deep cut on his wrist and the water-stained red. Sohrab tried to kill himself because of the news he got before. He didn't want to go back to an orphanage because he was scared he might get raped again.

In the hospital, Sohrab recovers, but he is scared of the different traumas of his life and will no longer speak. In America, Amir and his wife, Soraya, adopted Sohrab, but Sohrab didn't talk or smile anymore. Amir brings Sohrab on a family outing to join fellow Afghans for a communal cookout to play Afghan music and fly kites following the events of September 11, 2001. A small tournament of kite fighters has started, and Amir buys a kite for Sohrab. Sohrab is cautious at first but obviously intrigued. When they cut a kite down together, Amir asks Sohrab if he would like him to run it for him, prompting Sohrab to smile momentarily.

I really liked Kite Runner because it was very interesting, and Khaled Hosseini wrote it very well. I liked how the author described and portrayed Hassan and Amir's relationship. Like how they grew up together, played in the snow together, Amir read books to Hassan, and basically just did everything together. After all of this, Amir still betrays. Throughout their childhood, Hassan was loyal to him and protected him every time Assef tried to bully them. Even after Amir watched him get raped and fired him for stealing his watch, he was still loyal to him by taking the blame. After years apart and not seeing each other, he still goes to Amir's old house to see him. I also really liked how there were so many lessons in the book. No matter how big a mistake you have made, it is still possible to change and make things right. But one of the quotes I liked best from the book was that stealing is the worst crime and that if you lie to someone, you are stealing their right to the truth, and if you kill a man, you steal a life, you steal his wife's rights to a husband, and you rob his children of a father, and finally if you cheat you steal the right to fairness.

I also really liked how the author used Arabic words during some dialogue so the readers could use context clues to guess what the word meant. I also thought about why the author made both Hassan and Amir's mothers die and whether the story would have turned out differently. The only thing I didn't like was all the violence and the sexual assault and rape. Even though I understand that it was necessary to the story, if you read the book and liked it, you should read these books:

Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi

I am Malala by Malala Yousufzai

Animal farm by George Orwell

1984 by George Orwell