1. State the title, author, and number of pages.
For the third quarter I read A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini. It was 372 pages.
2. Tell what the book is about. Describe the setting
This book starts off from the perspective of Mariam’s life in Herat. She lives with her mother, Nana. When she was pregnant with Mariam, her mother and a housemaid for her father, Jalil, she was tossed out and was given a small and dirty shack to live in. As Mariam grew up Jalil visited her every so often. She looked up to him. On her birthday she wanted him to take her to his cinema and despite her mother’s pleads not for her to go, she snuck away and walked the long way to her father’s house. Her father didn’t come out and Mariam slept on the street through the night. In the morning one of his drivers took her home, where they found that Nana had hung herself in a tree. After the funeral, Jalil takes her into his home only to give her away to a man named Rasheed, a man much older than Mariam who lives in Kabul, for marriage. After a few failed pregnancies, Rasheed gets tired of her and starts being abusive. Then the book switched to another character, Laila, who was born a while after Mariam and Rasheed got married. Her best friend Tariq lost one of his legs from a land mine. As they grow up together they fall in love with each other. Later though Tariq’s family moves to Pakistan to escape from the war. Laila is devastated, and before he leaves they have sex. Tariq asked Laila to marry him and come with his family, but she knows she can’t leave her own family. Her two brothers had died and it broke her mother. Finally her mother agrees to move out of Kabul, but while they were packing a bomb hits her home, killing her mother and father, and left Laila severely injured. Rasheed finds her and brings her into his home where he and Mariam take care of her. When she was starting to get a lot better a man