The Kite Runner

Title: The Kite Runner
Author: Khaled Hosseini
Publisher: Riverhead
Copyright: 2003
ISBN: 9781573222457

Reading Level: Adult
Interest Age: Grade 10 and up

Genre: Historical--World Historical Fiction--Twentieth Century

Reader’s Annotation: Amir carries the guilt of having failed his friend with him his whole life. When he learns there may be a way to make things right, he returns to Afghanistan, now under Taliban rule.

Plot Summary
In the first part of this three-part novel, Amir and Hassan are growing up together in Kabul. Amir is the son of a wealthy businessman, and Hassan is his father’s servant’s son. Despite the differences in their lives—Hassan is Hazara and Amir is Pashtun, Hassan waits on Amir and has to work instead of going to school—the two boys are very close. Their world darkens when an older boy, Assef, begins threatening Amir. Hassan frightens him off with his slingshot, but Assef vows revenge. Some months later Amir wins a kite battle, and when Hassan runs the last kite down for him, Assef corners, attacks, and rapes him. Amir does nothing to stop the assault, and to get rid of the reminder of his guilt he treats Hassan so badly that he and his father leave Kabul.

The second part of the book brings even greater changes to Amir’s life. He and his father flee Kabul in the wake of the invasion by the Soviet Union. They go to Fremont, California, where they find a large Afghani immigrant community. Amir’s father works at a gas station and Amir finishes school. He falls in love with another Afghani immigrant, Soraya, and they marry just before Amir’s father dies of cancer.

In the third part, Amir answers a summons to return to Afghanistan to make things right with Hassan. Hassan and his wife have been murdered by the Taliban, and his son is in a Kabul orphanage. Amir sets out to rescue the boy from the hell Kabul has become.

Critical Evaluation
I found this book disappointing, primarily because I had heard so many good things about it. I didn’t think it lived up to the hype. I had also read several books in a row in which the reader is told that something horrible is going to happen long before it does, and I was sick of it. I find this technique is rarely effective; it’s better to just tell the story and use tone and subtle foreshadowing to induce foreboding in the reader. (The Book Thief is an exception in which giving away the ending early works well.)

I have a few more complaints, too. I found Hassan unrealistic and underdeveloped—too saintly and subservient. I also got tired of listening to Amir talk about how guilty he felt. The fact that he starts doing it long before the cause of his shame actually happens didn’t help. Furthermore, the final section stretched my suspension of disbelief a little too far. I found the plot twists involving Hassan’s son too dramatic for credibility.

On the positive side, the book is elegantly written, and Amir and his father are interesting, well-rounded characters. We see Amir’s father go from proud, intimidating business magnate to gas station clerk. He regains some of his old dignity when he’s among other Afghan immigrants, but it is further taxed when he is diagnosed with cancer. It’s touching to see how Amir comes to see his father as a person through these hardships. In Afghanistan, Amir longed for his father’s approval but regarded him with an awe that put him at an emotional remove.

Probably my favorite thing about the book is the amount of detail it gives about Afghanistan’s ethnic groups, languages, cultures, and history. I learned a great deal, for example, that Farsi is one of Afghanistan’s major languages.

Curriculum Ties: History/government--Afghanistan, Taliban, war in Afghanistan

Booktalking Ideas
Describe Amir and Hassan as boys.
Describe how Amir and Baba's lives changed when they fled to California.

Challenge Issues: Language, violence

In the defense file, I will include my library's selection policy, ALA's Library Bill of Rights, ALA's guidelines on free access to libraries for minors (http://www.ala.org/ala/issuesadvocacy/intfreedom/librarybill/interpretations/freeaccesslibraries.cfm), and ALA's strategies and tips for dealing with challenges to library materials (http://www.ala.org/ala/issuesadvocacy/banned/challengeslibrarymaterials/copingwithchallenges/strategiestips/index.cfm). I will also include my library's reconsideration form, in case challenges to this book cannot be defused with "tea and sympathy." I'll include positive reviews from Publishers Weekly, School Library Journal, and Booklist and mixed reviews from Amazon.com and the New York Times Book Review.

About the Author
Khaled Hosseini was born in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1965. His father was a diplomat with the Afghan Foreign Ministry and his mother taught Farsi and History at a large high school in Kabul. In 1976, the Afghan Foreign Ministry relocated the Hosseini family to Paris. They were ready to return to Kabul in 1980, but by then Afghanistan had already witnessed a bloody communist coup and the invasion of the Soviet army. The Hosseinis sought and were granted political asylum in the United States. In September of 1980, Hosseini's family moved to San Jose, California. Hosseini graduated from high school in 1984 and enrolled at Santa Clara University where he earned a bachelor's degree in Biology in 1988. The following year, he entered the University of California-San Diego's School of Medicine, where he earned a Medical Degree in 1993. He completed his residency at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles. Hosseini was a practicing internist between 1996 and 2004.

While in medical practice, Hosseini began writing his first novel, The Kite Runner, in March of 2001. In 2003, The Kite Runner was published and has since become an international bestseller, published in 70 countries. In 2006 he was named a goodwill envoy to UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency.  His second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, was published in May of 2007. Currently, A Thousand Splendid Suns is published in 60 countries. Khaled has been working to provide humanitarian assistance in Afghanistan through The Khaled Hosseini Foundation. The concept for The Khaled Hosseini Foundation was inspired by a trip to Afghanistan Khaled made in 2007 with the UNHCR. He lives in northern California.

http://www.khaledhosseini.com/hosseini-bio.html

Why is this title included?
Cart identifies The Kite Runner as an adult book that is a crossover hit with teens. It's also received great critical acclaim, including the Boeke Prize.

Karma

Title: Karma
Author: Cathy Ostlere
Publisher: Razorbill
Copyright: 2011
ISBN: 9781595143389

Reading Level/Interest Age: Grade 9 and up

Genre: Historical--World Historical Fiction--Twentieth Century, Alternate Formats--Verse Novels

Reader’s Annotation: Jiva is on her own somewhere in India, so traumatized by violence that she refuses to speak.

Plot Summary
Jiva is the product of a mixed marriage. Her Sikh father calls her by her given name, but her Hindu mother calls her Maya. They live in a Canadian prairie town where they are the only people of color. Though Jiva feels like an outsider there, she’s never even been to her parents’ homeland, India. When her mother commits suicide, Jiva and her father take her ashes home. But just after they arrive in Delhi, Indira Ghandi, the Hindu prime minister, is assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards. The city erupts into violence. Jiva is separated from her father and gets on a train to escape Delhi. On the way, the train is boarded by a mob, and Jiva witnesses an horrific murder that causes her to stop speaking.

In a city on the edge of the desert a family agrees to let Maya stay with them until she recovers. The adopted son of the family, Sandeep, falls in love with her. But her sudden appearance and strange behavior cause a scandal, and soon she is forced to leave. Sandeep, his father, and an aggressive caravan leader take her into the desert to find a place for her to stay—but what her fate will be when she arrives, no one will say. After she runs away into the desert and nearly dies, Maya finally regains her voice and professes her love for Sandeep. Together they head back to Delhi to see if they can find her father.

Critical Evaluation
Karma is a verse novel with an interesting form. The first section, “Maya’s Diary,” tells of Maya/Jiva’s past, arrival in India, and flight to the interior. After she stops speaking, “Sandeep’s Notebook” begins. Sandeep tells about Maya’s time in his parents’ house and their journey across the desert, with occasional (written) interpolations from Maya. In the final part, “Jiva’s Journal,” Maya/Jiva takes over again.

Both of the voices are full of personality and emotion. Maya is passionate, contemplative, and very sad. Sandeep is outwardly cocky and loquacious, but his headlong plunge into love reveals his deep insecurity. When Maya resumes the narrative, her voice is fresh and newly hopeful. She writes,
“Oh, I have missed this,
A book.
A pen.
The empty page waiting.
Waiting for my voice!
…
Liquid thoughts.
Swelling letters.
A river of ink flowing
black and wet.
Flooding the paper banks.”
Both narrators powerfully evoke violence, color, and first love in spare yet luscious free verse.

Though the plot stalls in places, the setting and characters are riveting. Ostlere sensitively explores Jiva’s divided identity and loyalties, as well as issues such as suicide, prejudice, and hatred. There is a lot to learn from her account of the events of November 1984 and the glimpse she offers into the India of that time.

Curriculum Ties: History--India, religious conflict

Booktalking Ideas
Recount the true events that provide the backdrop for this novel.
Read Sandeep's charming start to his portion of the narrative ("Top six reasons to (maybe) keep a diary").

Challenge Issues: Violence, language

In the defense file, I will include my library's selection policy, ALA's Library Bill of Rights, ALA's guidelines on free access to libraries for minors (http://www.ala.org/ala/issuesadvocacy/intfreedom/librarybill/interpretations/freeaccesslibraries.cfm), and ALA's strategies and tips for dealing with challenges to library materials (http://www.ala.org/ala/issuesadvocacy/banned/challengeslibrarymaterials/copingwithchallenges/strategiestips/index.cfm). I will also include my library's reconsideration form, in case challenges to this book cannot be defused with "tea and sympathy." I'll include a glowing review from Booklist, positive reviews from Publishers Weekly and VOYA, and a negative review from Kirkus Reviews.

About the Author
Cathy Ostlere was born in Portage La Prairie, Manitoba. She and her three siblings grew up as air force brats moving between Manitoba and Ontario military bases. Her family eventually settled in Winnipeg, the home of her Ukrainian grandparents, where Cathy completed high school and a degree in English at the University of Manitoba. Post-graduation she worked in Toronto for Warner Publisher Services. In 1983, she began a journey that would take her through sixteen countries in eighteen months. A chance encounter with a sailing crew allowed her to visit thirteen of the Greek islands and cruise the coastline of Turkey. In 1984, she continued traveling, going east to India, South East Asia, Australia, New Zealand and the South Pacific. Upon her return to Canada in 1985, she settled in Calgary. Over the next ten years she was an at-home parent for three children and a freelance writer. In 1990, she took her first creative writing class.

Cathy Ostlere’s first book, LOST, began as a series of poems but grew into creative non-fiction essays with the assistance of Sharon Butala, Greg Hollingshead and Edna Alford at the Banff Centre and Roberta Rees at the University of Calgary. Karen Connelly, of the Humber School of Writing, guided LOST into a memoir. Essays excerpted from LOST have been short-listed for the National Magazine Awards, Western Magazine Awards, CBC Literary Awards, and Prism International and Event Magazine Non-fiction Contests. In 2009, Lost: A Memoir was shortlisted for the prestigious Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-fiction. In 2010, she co-wrote with Dennis Garnhum, Artistic Director of Theatre Calgary, LOST: A Memoir, a 90 minute one-woman play performed in Calgary and expected to tour Canada over the next two years. Her first novel, Karma, a verse novel written for young adults, was released by Penguin in March 2011.

http://cathy-ostlere.com/author/

Why is this title included?
I read about this book in an NPR article that identified five recent YA releases with crossover appeal for adults (http://www.npr.org/2011/08/09/137456199/hooray-for-ya-teen-novels-for-readers-of-all-ages). As an historical, multicultural verse novel it brings needed diversity to this collection.

Nation

Title: Nation
Author: Terry Pratchett
Publisher: HarperCollins
Copyright: 2008
ISBN: 9780061433016

Reading Level/Interest Age: Grades 7-12

Genre: Adventure/Thrilllers--Survival Stories

Reader’s Annotation: When a tsunami destroys his world, Mau sets out to rebuild it with the help of a "ghost girl," Daphne.

Plot Summary
While Mau is on his way home from time spent on an uninhabited island as part of his coming-of-age ritual, a great wave sweeps over his home (“the Nation”) and the surrounding islands. Mau returns to his home to find everyone dead. How could the gods have let this happen? Mau collects the bodies of his people, giving them proper burials at sea so they can become dolphins. But he is not alone on the island. An English girl, Daphne, whose ship was carried up onto the island survived the wreck. At first deeply suspicious of each other, Mau and Daphne (whom he thinks of as “the ghost girl”) gradually learn to communicate and come to rely on each other. Soon more people, survivors from other, smaller islands, begin arriving. Together they begin building a new society built on both the traditions of the Nation and Daphne’s rationalism. But soon this fledgling people faces its greatest challenge yet—cannibal raiders are on their way, led by the mutineers from Daphne’s ship.

Critical Evaluation
Nation starts out promisingly. The scenes of Mau’s return to his ruined home and his burial work are very powerful, and his early interactions with Daphne humorous. The writing is elegant and the setting detailed. Mau and Daphne are believable and touching as two teens who have lost everything but gather their hope and courage to try to build a good world. Unfortunately, Pratchett can’t resist hammering away on the “problem of evil.” While Mau’s questions about how the gods could allow his world to be destroyed (and his conclusion that they must not exist) are valid and thought-provoking, Pratchett allows these questions to dominate, rather than inform, the story. The priest character, who argues with Mau about continuing the religious practices of the Nation, is a cartoonish, dogmatic, lazy jerk. Toward the end of the book, Mau makes an unlikely discovery that further derails the plot. Deep in a cave he finds evidence that his people had astronomy and other sciences before Europeans did; they just forgot about them because they became too religious. This has the opposite effect Pratchett intends. Instead of showing that all of the world’s cultures deserve respect for their unique contributions, this discovery seems to say that only advanced science can put other cultures on an equal footing with the western world.

Curriculum Ties: N/A

Booktalking Ideas: What if your whole life were swept away? How would you rebuild it? Whom would you trust? How would it change you?

Challenge Issues: Anti-religious content, violence

In the defense file, I will include my library's selection policy, ALA's Library Bill of Rights, ALA's guidelines on free access to libraries for minors (http://www.ala.org/ala/issuesadvocacy/intfreedom/librarybill/interpretations/freeaccesslibraries.cfm), and ALA's strategies and tips for dealing with challenges to library materials (http://www.ala.org/ala/issuesadvocacy/banned/challengeslibrarymaterials/copingwithchallenges/strategiestips/index.cfm). I will also include my library's reconsideration form, in case challenges to this book cannot be defused with "tea and sympathy." I'll include reviews from School Library Journal, Booklist, Bookmarks Magazine, Kirkus Reviews, Kliatt, The Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books, and VOYA.

About the Author
SIR TERRY PRATCHETT: born 28 April 1948, Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire. Major source of education: Beaconsfield Public Library (though school must have been of some little help). After passing his 11-plus in 1959, he attended High Wycombe Technical High School rather than the local grammar because he felt ‘woodwork would be more fun than Latin’. At this time he had no real vision of what he wanted to do with his life, and remembers himself as a ‘nondescript student’.

When Terry was thirteen, his short story ‘The Hades Business’ was published in the school magazine Technical Cygnet, and two years later, commercially, in Science Fantasy. With the proceeds he bought his first typewriter. Other short stories –  ‘Solution’, ‘The Picture’ and maybe others, yet undiscovered –  also appeared in the Cygnet. Terry was in line for a bright future. Having earned five O-levels and started A-level courses in Art, History and English, he decided after the first year to try journalism, and when a job opportunity came up on the Bucks Free Press, he talked things over with his parents, and left school in 1965. While with the Press he still read avidly, took the two-year National Council for the Training of Journalists proficiency course (and came top in the country in its exams) and passed an A level in English, both while on day release.

Terry married Lyn Purves at the Congregational Church in Gerrards Cross in October 1968, by which time he had interviewed Peter Bander van Duren, my fellow director of our publishing company Colin Smythe Limited, for the Bucks Free Press about a book he had edited on education in the coming decade, Looking forward to the Seventies. At this time Terry mentioned to him that he had written a book called The Carpet People and asked whether we would consider it for publication? So Peter passed it to me. Yes. It was a delight, and it was obvious that here was an author we had to publish.

He was working at the CEGB when we published the first of the Discworld books, The Colour of Magic, in 1983.

While on tour in America in summer 2007, Terry told audiences at the National Book Festival in Washington DC (during which Terry breakfasted at the White House and dined at the Library of Congress with the other featured authors) and in New York, that he’d had a stroke, but the symptoms had been misdiagnosed, and were of a far worse illness, posterior cortical atrophy, a rare variant of Alzheimer’s disease, which was diagnosed in December.

Terry has now written fifty books (of which thirty-nine are Discworld novels) and co-authored a further fifty more. Between them they have sold over 65 million copies in thirty-seven languages, which I calculate would be a pile of books over 1,000 miles high, stretching further than Land’s End in Cornwall to the furthest tip of the Shetland Islands off the north coast of Scotland – or from New Orleans to Chicago, and then some.

The year [2008] climaxed with the announcement that Terry had been included in the 2009 New Year’s Honours List, being appointed a Knight Bachelor, ‘for services to literature’, with the press handout adding that it was ‘in recognition of the huge impact his work has had across all ages and strata of society and across the world’.
   
Terry is now an adjunct Professor at Trinity College, Dublin University, and in November 2010 went to Dublin to give his inaugural lecture and masterclasses, as he did so again in March 2011.

http://www.colinsmythe.co.uk/terrypages/tpindex.htm

Why is this title included?
Nation is on many best-of lists and has won several prestigious awards, including Best Kids Books of the Year, Washington Post, 2008; Booklist Best Books for Young Adults, 2009; Publishers Weekly Best Children's Books, 2008; School Library Journal Best Books, 2008; YALSA Top Ten Best Books for Young Adults, 2009; Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for Excellence in Children's Literature, 2009 Winner Fiction and Poetry; Los Angeles Times Book Prize, 2008 Winner Young Adult Literature; and the Michael L. Printz Award, 2009 Honor Book. Obviously other reviewers found it less flawed than I did.