Writing Resources from Fifteen Minutes of Fiction

Reading Response 2

Reading Response #2 – The Kite Runner

In my last reading response I predicted that something bad would happen to Amir. It turned out that the bad thing happened to his friend, Hazzan. Amir witnesses him being assaulted by some other boys and doesn’t step in to help him. He is riddled with guilt, sleepless, but cannot bring himself to tell anyone about it because of the shame.

Ultimately Hazzan tells his father, Amir’s family’s servant, about the assault and how Amir didn’t come to help him. Hazzan’s father announces to Amir’s father, Baba, that they are moving away, back to his natal village. Baba is devastated and doesn’t understand why they are moving away. Amir doesn’t tell him. This brings to a conclusion the first part of the book set in Afghanistan.

Amir and his father move to the United States to start a new life full of hope for the future. His father sets up a small Afghani grocery which is quite successful, selling Afghani foods and videos to the new immigrants in their neighborhood. He also buys an old rusty Volkswagen van to launch another business venture.

Amir and his father comb garage sales every weekend looking for cheap goods that they can resell on Sunday afternoons at the flea market. This reminds me of a couple of people I know – Benoit, my friend from France, who discovered garage sales when he came to Canada and became totally addicted to going out every weekend to find “cheap stuff”. It also reminds me of my mother’s friend, Russell, who fills up his basement with garage sale finds so that he can then hold his own garage sales and try to make a tidy profit.

At the flea market Amir meets a beautiful Afghani girl his own age named Soraya. He carefully waits for her father to leave their flea market table every Saturday for coffee and a chat with the other Afghani men. Then he heads over to her table to “chat her up”. He is very careful, though, because Soraya’s father is a powerful ex-general of the Afghani army – fortunately Soraya’s mother likes him very much and encourages his visits.

Knowing that Soraya is interested in reading , he brings one of the stories he has written at college for her to read. When he hands it to her, the general is just arriving back from his coffee break. He grabs the papers and throws them in the garbage. I predict that Amir is going to have a hard time winning over Soniya’s father in order to be able to see her anymore. However ultimately I think he will be successful because Soraya’s mother has already shown that she likes him and will probably be able to soften up her gruff ex-general husband.

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