A thousand splendid suns - Fifth blog post
The turning point of the book occurs when Mariam murders Rasheed. After that, the lives of the two women take very different paths. Mariam eventually is caught and put into a prison run by the Taliban. She tries to explain that she was defending herself when she killed Rasheed, but the judge sentences Mariam to death. As I could never imagine, Mariam is publicly executed. Hearing this, Laila marry the long ago neighbor and good friend Tariq and start a new life in Pakistan.
After the attack on the United States in 2001, president George Bush starts the today well known "War on Terror", and conditions in Kabul, the city where Laila lived with Mariam and Rasheed, improve. When Laila hears about this, she wishes to return to help and Tariq agrees.
Laila now starts teaching at an orphanage and Tariq works for an organization that fits land mine victims with prosthetic limbs, because fitting enought, he himself lost a leg in the war.
As heartbreaking as the story is, I can't see any better outcome of the book. You really got to see the worst parts of the war and Hosseini did a spectacular work on making you feel one with the women in the story. That in mind, I can now understand how people live in this part of the world. Even thought the fact that this is a book, I could truly believe that this could have been a true story.
