The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini

Unless there are redeeming features (such as humour or splendid characters), I tend to find stories of horror and sentimentality redundant and typically distasteful. They foist on us cheap, shallow emotion that disturbs while teaching us nothing. The Kite Runner is light on the horror, but makes one insistent tug on the heart strings after another.
 
Once Amir the boy and his particular unpleasantness were left behind and he was grown up and in courting in the USA, I managed to warm to him briefly, but not to the book.
 
I hadn’t bargained for all the lachrymose parallels and coincidences: the tragic family deaths, the return of Aseef, the sexual assaults, the split lips, the noble generosities, the motherless sons, the fated return of the bloody kite.
 
By the time I reached the end, the corny inevitability of what was going to happen was unbearable.