This, refreshingly, is a tale with drama where the drama's not at all faux - I think it helps that the author's gay himself and from an ethnic background where a lot of what he's written might have grains of a personal truth in it.
I liked that it was told from Amir's voice, but that the voices of his mother, father and sister - all trying to figure out where he is and why he's done a flit (in their eyes, as he once 'ran away' from home - overnight) - punctuate the tale. I loved his sister's support and also her resentment that he didn't tell her what was up, and I loved her sleuthing on social media that led to her figuring out where he was and what he was doing. I loved his mother's conflict in the sense that I could see how torn she was - protecting her son from future pain as a gay ethnic man, and a Muslim at that, in today's USA; protecting her innocent young daughter from having her eyes exposed to too much too soon; and her trying to temper her husband, because of how he'd reacted before, and because of his toxic masculinity, which I felt wasn't an affectation, but to do with his past, his experiences, his worries as a father and as a Muslim man who's seen prejudice in his time in the USA. The tale flowed and felt natural and the only thing I didn't like was that Amir encountered a group of slightly older gay men in Rome, all of whom took him under their wing, and he wasn't honest with them about his reasons for being in Rome. He kind of did have his reasons, but he told a version of the truth he'd anticipated - perhaps not wrongly - but hadn't actually experienced due to his doing a flit. Still, though, this is one of the best, sweetest, funniest and most touching books I've read in a while.
I liked that it was told from Amir's voice, but that the voices of his mother, father and sister - all trying to figure out where he is and why he's done a flit (in their eyes, as he once 'ran away' from home - overnight) - punctuate the tale. I loved his sister's support and also her resentment that he didn't tell her what was up, and I loved her sleuthing on social media that led to her figuring out where he was and what he was doing. I loved his mother's conflict in the sense that I could see how torn she was - protecting her son from future pain as a gay ethnic man, and a Muslim at that, in today's USA; protecting her innocent young daughter from having her eyes exposed to too much too soon; and her trying to temper her husband, because of how he'd reacted before, and because of his toxic masculinity, which I felt wasn't an affectation, but to do with his past, his experiences, his worries as a father and as a Muslim man who's seen prejudice in his time in the USA. The tale flowed and felt natural and the only thing I didn't like was that Amir encountered a group of slightly older gay men in Rome, all of whom took him under their wing, and he wasn't honest with them about his reasons for being in Rome. He kind of did have his reasons, but he told a version of the truth he'd anticipated - perhaps not wrongly - but hadn't actually experienced due to his doing a flit. Still, though, this is one of the best, sweetest, funniest and most touching books I've read in a while.