What Changes Everything by Masha Hamilton

What Changes Everything by Masha Hamilton
Published May 2013 by Unbridled Books
Source: bought this one

Publisher's Summary:
In a gamble to save her kidnapped husband’s life, Clarissa Barbery makes the best decisions she can in the dark nights of Brooklyn. Stela Sidorova, who owns a used bookstore in Ohio, writes letter after letter hoping to comprehend the loss of a son on an Afghan battlefield and to reconnect with the son who abandoned her when his brother died. And Mandy Wilkens, the mother of a gravely wounded soldier from Texas, travels to Kabul to heal wounds of several kinds. At the same time, What Changes Everything is the story of two Afghans who reveal the complexity of their culture, the emotions that hold it together and those that threaten to fracture it. These lives are braided into an extraordinary novel about the grace of family.


My Thoughts:
Eight-ish years ago, I read and was completely sucked in by Hamilton's 31 Hours (my review). When What Changes Everything was released in 2013, I was just starting to use Netgalley and eagerly requested an ecopy of the book. Then it archived before I got a chance to read it and other books came along and...well, you know how this story goes. A year or so ago, I found a copy at Better World Books and it's been sitting on my shelf since, waiting for me to finally get around to it.

The problem with putting this book off for five years is that it doesn't feel as topical as it would have in 2013, when Afghanistan was still a country in the news every day. Still, the conflict in Afghanistan serves as a compelling backdrop for exploring cultural differences, our role on the world stage, and family dynamics. What Changes Everything looks at the ways that war (whether we call it that or not) leaves scars on everyone involved. You know me well enough by now to know that after reading this book, I had to go learn more about Mohammad Najibullah, former president of Afghanistan, whose actual letters to his daughters appear throughout the book as a way of helping readers understand Afghanistan.

There are a lot of storylines running through this book that all, in one way or another, tie together. As with most books that try to balance numerous storylines, I found some more gripping than others - Clarissa as she tries to cope with her own history and fears while dealing with a step daughter, friends, and the government who all want a say in how to proceed with her husband's kidnapping; Danil, who uses graffiti art to try to deal with the pain of losing his brother and the pain of a mother who will not accept the realities of her son's death; and Amin, who lives in a no man's land between the Americans and his own people and who carries almost unbearable guilt for the death of someone who tried to help years ago.

What Changes Everything doesn't have the tension that had me racing through 31 Hours, but it did pull me into these people's lives and made me want to find out how they might find a way to heal. And it raised questions that still have me thinking:

"Here he was, face-to-face with a question that had been nibbling at him for months. How much responsibility did one person have toward another? If what you mainly had in common was being alive at the same moment and in the same physical space, and then being present enough to see a need, how far must your outstretched hand reach?"

And The Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini

And The Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini
Published May 2013 by Riverhead Books
Narrators:  Khaled Hosseini, Navid Nagahban, Shohreh Aghdashloo
Source: my audio copy purchased at my local library book sale

Publisher's Summary:
In this tale revolving around not just parents and children but brothers and sisters, cousins and caretakers, Hosseini explores the many ways in which families nurture, wound, betray, honor, and sacrifice for one another; and how often we are surprised by the actions of those closest to us, at the times that matter most. Following its characters and the ramifications of their lives and choices and loves around the globe—from Kabul to Paris to San Francisco to the Greek island of Tinos—the story expands gradually outward, becoming more emotionally complex and powerful with each turning page.


My Thoughts:
Read that summary and find yourself still wondering what this book is about? That's because And The Mountains Echoed is not so much a novel as a series of interconnected stories, with characters appearing and reappearing throughout the book. In the background runs the story of Abdullah and his sister, Pari.

Abdullah, 10 when the book begins, has raised Pari, 3, since their mother died giving birth to her and their father sank into a depression. Desperate poverty, and a connection through his new wife's brother, result in the children's father selling Pari to a childless couple in Kabul.

From there, the stories fan out, including Abdullah's family and the people involved with the house in Kabul - Pari's new mother, Nila, who flees to Paris with Pari to pursue a life she could not have in Afghanistan; Pari's new father who stays in Kabul, harboring a secret that could get him killed and cared for until his death by Pari's step-uncle whose guilt at setting up the sale of Pari will haunt him to his death;  the foreign doctors and nurses who came to the country care the victims of the violence tearing apart the country; Gholam, Abdullah's half-brother,'s son, who will tie the story back to what became of Abdullah's poor village in light of the wars; and then back to Abdullah, who lives out his life as the owner of Abe's Kabob House in California and who never stops missing his sister.

As with most collections, some stories are not as strong, less interesting and with characters that more are strictly good or bad. Perhaps that comes from Hosseini's own experience with the struggles that Afghanistan has been through since before the Russians invaded.  For the most part, the characters and stories are nuanced and beautifully told. Hosseini brings the larger sorrows of his country down to an intimate level, easier for

The narration is a bit tricky. All three narrators speak heavily-accented English and it can take a bit to fall into their rhythm and inflection. Yet, as this is a book about Afghanis, their voices lend a much more authentic feel to the stories, pulling readers thoroughly into the country.

When The Moon Is Low by Nadia Hashimi

When The Moon Is Low by Nadia Hashimi
Published July 2015 by HarperCollins Publishers, paperback edition April 2016
Source: my copy courtesy of the publisher and TLC Book Tours in exchange for an honest review

Publisher's Summary:
Mahmoud's passion for his wife Fereiba, a schoolteacher, is greater than any love she's ever known. But their happy, middle-class world—a life of education, work, and comfort—implodes when their country is engulfed in war, and the Taliban rises to power.

Mahmoud, a civil engineer, becomes a target of the new fundamentalist regime and is murdered. Forced to flee Kabul with her three children, Fereiba has one hope to survive: she must find a way to cross Europe and reach her sister's family in England. With forged papers and help from kind strangers they meet along the way, Fereiba make a dangerous crossing into Iran under cover of darkness. Exhausted and brokenhearted but undefeated, Fereiba manages to smuggle them as far as Greece. But in a busy market square, their fate takes a frightening turn when her teenage son, Saleem, becomes separated from the rest of the family.

Faced with an impossible choice, Fereiba pushes on with her daughter and baby, while Saleem falls into the shadowy underground network of undocumented Afghans who haunt the streets of Europe's capitals. Across the continent Fereiba and Saleem struggle to reunite, and ultimately find a place where they can begin to reconstruct their lives.

My Thoughts: 
So you know how publisher's summaries generally give you maybe a third of the story? Yeah, this one goes much further than that. So, if the summary intrigues you, add it to your list then don't pick it up to read the book until you've forgotten what you read here.

The other interesting thing about this summary is that it doesn't start at the beginning of the book. It's Fereiba's early years that color all of her choices - the death of her mother at her birth, a father who cannot stop grieving and can't face Fereiba without thinking of his dead wife, a stepmother who gives her just enough to make Fereiba hope for a mother's love but not much more, and an angel, who promises to watch over her through her life. For the first half of the book, the story is Fereiba's - a story of longing, heartache, anguish, fear, and hope.

Once Fereiba and her children are forced to flee Afghanistan, the story shifts and becomes more and more Saleem's story. Told from the third person, although Saleem's life is more desperate and more reflective of the trials of refugees, it becomes more distant and harder to connect with the story. Because Hashimi wants to leave her reader with hope, things never quite become as tense and horrible as they might have. Still, with the continuing refugee situation in the Middle East (and world wide), it's important to put readers into the shoes of the disenfranchised, to make those of us sitting in our comfortable homes understand how hard life can be and to, hopefully, become more compassionate.

You know how much I enjoy books set in the Middle East and this one was no exception. Hashimi does a wonderful job of immersing readers into the culture of Afghanistan and making them understand life, particularly as a woman, in the region. The book could have benefited from more editing where it sometimes became repetitive, but I became caught up in Fereiba's story, the story of a mother who is fighting to make a better life for herself and her children.

Thanks to the ladies at TLC Book Tours for including me on this tour. For more reviews, check out the full tour.

Nadia Hashimi’s parents left Afghanistan in the 1970s, before the Soviet invasion. She was raised in the United States, and in 2002 she visited Afghanistan for the first time with her parents. Hashimi is a pediatrician and lives with her family in suburban Washington, D.C. Find out more about Nadia at her website, connect with her on Facebook, and follow her on Twitter.

She is the author of The Pearl That Broke Its Shell, which I enjoyed and reviewed here. As long as Hashimi continues to write books about the women of Afghanistan that make me think, I will continue to read them.

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
Published November 2008 by Penguin Group
Narrated by Atossa Leoni
Source: I bought both of the copies of this one that I own - once again, I have it in both print and audio

Publisher's Summary:
Born a generation apart and with very different ideas about love and family, Mariam and Laila are two women brought jarringly together by war, by loss and by fate. As they endure the ever escalating dangers around them—in their home as well as in the streets of Kabul—they come to form a bond that makes them both sisters and mother-daughter to each other, and that will ultimately alter the course not just of their own lives but of the next generation.  

My Thoughts:
Mariam is forced, as an fifteen-year-old, to marry forty-year-old Rasheed. It seems at first that life will be better than expected until Rasheed gradually begins to show his true colors, first by insisting that Mariam wear a burka when they're out in public. When she is unable to give him a son, the beatings begin and eighteen years after they marry, Rasheed takes another young wife. Laila has her own reasons for accepting Rasheed's offer of marriage. Even so, she is much less willing to take Rasheed's abuse than Mariam has been and Mariam slowly begins to come back to herself.

I really wanted to be emotionally caught up in this book; I really should have been caught up emotionally in this book. Mariam's and Laila's stories are heartbreaking, as is the story of what has happened to Afghanistan in the past three decades. War, abuse, constant fear - this should have been a book that kept me on edge but it just didn't. Perhaps it was the experience of listening to it (although the narration is really quite good and I think having the authentic voice added a lot to the story) while driving and not being able to be totally immersed. Still, if for no other reason than to learn a tremendous amount about life, particularly life as a woman, in a part of the world that never ceases to interest me, A Thousand Splendid Suns is a book worth reading.

In My Father's Country by Saima Wahab

In My Father's Country by Saima Wahab
Published April 2012 by Crown Publishing Group
Source: the publisher and TLC Book Tours

""I was welcomed into this world with gunshots."

In Afghanistan, when a son is born, tradition dictates that the father rushes into the street with his pistol and fires a few rounds into the air to celebrate. My father did this for Khalid, my older brother, his firstborn, as was the Pashtun custom. A little over a year later, minutes after I was born, my father rushed outside with his weapon and did the same..."I promise that my daughter will prove that she is better than many Pashtun sons, and will do more for her people than on hundred sons combined.""

Five years later, Saima Wahab's father was taken from his home by the Russians who were infiltrating the country. Saima never saw him again. Fearful, the family fled Kabul, eventually reuniting in Pakistan. But even there, Wahab's mother feared for her children's safety and sent them to live with uncles in Portland, Oregon. Saima, who had long rebelled against the treatment of women in her country, was surprised to find herself unable to fully integrate into American culture but also unable to live up to her uncle's standards. After fleeing her uncle's homes, she was estranged from her family for many years and fell into a deep depression as she struggled to find a way to blend her Afghan roots and her love of America. One day she received a call that would change her life. The United States was looking for Pashtun translators to assist the troops in Afghanistan. It would offer Wahab the opportunity to revisit the land of her father and try to come to terms with her heritage.

"On that long flight to my motherland, I made two promises to myself: one, that if ever I saw that Afghanistan had become a country my father would be ashamed of, I would leave that same day. The second was inspired by my paranoia...I would guard my American passport with my life. I feared that the men of Afghanistan would suck me back into a life with no rights, a life that I thought I had escaped - the shackles that so many Afghan women accept as their fate."

I always jump at the chance to read books from this part of the world, both fiction and nonfiction.  I am so intrigued by the culture, heritage and struggles of the country and never fail to learn from these books. In My Father's Country was no exception. Having just read The Dressmaker of Khair Khana, I was concerned that there would be little more for me to glean about Afghanistan from this book. I could not have been more wrong. While Dressmaker did deal extensively with the plight of women in the country, it was only while reading In My Father's Country that I began to understand why women, even those who are opposed to their treatment, have a hard time fighting against it.

"In Pashtun culture, women are the protectors of family shame. A woman's behavior can ruin the status a family holds in the community. This strong link between women, pride, and shame is one of the primary reasons why women are so furiously protected and controlled."

Wahab also is able to give the reader a look at the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan at ground level. She must find her place amongst the U.S. forces, help to bring about a greater understanding between the U.S. and the Afghan locals. and find a way to balance her modern ways with the Afghan culture. After the six months that she had initially committed to were up, Wahab signed on for an extended stay, convinced she had not done enough. She was determined to fulfill what had been foretold by her father, who he didn't know at the time but in whom he had faith.

"I vowed then to spend the rest of my years on earth making his [her father's] words come true."

The story of Wahab's journey to do just that is an eye-opening look at her heritage and an inspiration. I can't imagine having the incredible courage Wahab had as she risked her life day after day, venturing into remote areas of her homeland in her capacity as a translator, knowing the very thing that made her such a valuable asset for the Americans also made her a huge target with the insurgency. Thanks so much to TLC Book Tours for including me on this tour. For other reviews, check out the full tour.

The Dressmaker of Khair Khana by Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

The Dressmaker of Khair Khana by Gayle Tzemach Lemmon
Published March 2011 by HarperCollins Publishers
Source: my copy courtesy of the publisher and TLC Book Tours

When the Taliban rode into Kabul in 1996 it wasn't as if they were seizing control of city where peace reigned and people went about their business without worry. Afghanistan had been a country in turmoil since the monarchy was overthrown in 1973. Within a year of a 1978 military coup, the U.S.S.R had moved into the country in force. Ten years later, the U.S.-supported Mujahideen toppled the Soviets but the void left behind led to years of civil war. Still, nothing could have prepared the residents of Kabul for the changes to their world the Taliban immediately began making.

Through all of the years of turmoil, Woja Abdul Sidiqi continued to believe in his country and instilled the importance of education in all eleven of his children, including his daughter, Kamila. Yet when the Taliban took control of Kabul, Kamila and her eight sisters could now longer go to school. In fact, they could no longer hold jobs, could no longer be seen out in public unless they were completely covered by a garment called a chadri and were accompanied by a male member of their own family, and could no longer speak to any male who was not a relative. They were regularly beaten for infringements as small as showing a wrist, speaking a bit too loudly, wearing the wrong shoes.

When both Woja, his wife and their oldest son were forced to flee Kabul, their daughters were left to fend for themselves. It didn't take long for then teenaged Kamila to realize that their money would not last long without a bread earner in the house and she was certain that she was not the kind of person who could just sit in the house day after day. One day she struck upon the idea of becoming a seamstress, a job she could do at home. Enlisting her oldest sister to teach her to sew, and her young brother to accompany her to the market to sell her goods, Kamila was soon making enough money to support her family but it wasn't enough of her. Quickly Kamila found ways to help other women support their own families, first through hiring them to help her family, then by starting a sewing school and eventually working with the UN to reach even more women.

Kamila Sidiqi is an astonishing young woman, the kind of woman that makes you wonder what kind of inner strength you might find in yourself if the circumstances called for it. Every day she and her family risked beatings and prison, yet Kamila persevered. She learned to work within the confines of the Taliban regime and how to deal with them when the need arose.

In 2005, Gayle Tzemach Lemmon, who was then a journalist, went in search of stories about women who not only survived war-torn countries but flourished as business women who not only supported their own families but whose work helped to rebuild their countries. Kamila Sidiqi's story was just the thing she was looking for and over the next few years, Lemmon became a part of the Sidiqi family as she explored the story of Kamila's commitment to her fellow woman.

The Dressmaker of Khair Khana is narrative nonfiction that pulls the reader in immediately. The book did feel as though it got bogged down a bit in the details early on and later I sometimes felt as if the book were racing ahead of itself. These are minor quibbles.Lemmon has crafted a book where the fear is so palpable that as I was reading I was often afraid to keep going so frightened was I of what might happen to Kamila and her family. I am deeply in awe of what Kamila Sidiqi has accomplished and grateful to Lemmon for bringing not only her story, but the stories of so many like her, to light.

To learn more about Gayle Lemmon, Kamila Sidiqi and groups that are working to help women world wide, visit Lemmon's website. For other opinions about the book, check out the full list of tour sites at TLC Book Tours.