Excellent book about finding out your hero is flawed (to say the least), also a look into the Afghani culture and how women are treated (not always great), the US Army vs. the places they are supposedly helping, and digging into your own motives for do-gooding and your understanding of self and place. A lot to unpack but through a very relatable readable novel - I highly recommend.

The end was a little undefined, and that was a bit disappointing.

Berkley educated Parveen is an idealistic American of Afghan heritage who decides to do research in a remote Afghan village that has become famous because of a memoir written by an American doctor who had spent time in the area and had funded a hospital in the village. Parveen is certain that her presence will do the locals some good, but nothing is as it seems. The doctor's memoir is mostly fabricated, the hospital is unstaffed, and Parveen's presence sets off deep and unexpected ripples. Masterfully written with a nuanced cast of characters and attention to the contradictory and layered nature of the American presence in Afghanistan, this book is a must-read.

Starts off slow but develops a hard-to-find sense of urgency towards the second half. Not everyone can do that.

Waldman tries to tap into a lot of hard hitting issues in this book about war, culture, power, perception and race. While the writing is beautiful, this book fell way short for me.

Parveen's naivety was so persistent it was almost insulting. It was like listening to an uneducated teenager tell everyone around them about how the world should be based on their limited understanding. I get that Parveen is only in college and that the way the story is told through Parveen's eyes helps to identify the complexities of these subjects but it feels as if there is an assumption that the audience is dumb.

I wouldn't want to spend ten minutes with Parveen let alone seeing her perspective for 400 pages. I think I would have preferred the book if it came from the perspective on an omnipresent narrator where Parveen was one of the characters. I think that would have worked to lift the audience up a little.

If anything this book does serve to highlight the lack of understanding from entitled people who think they can fix everything with little context or appreciation of the culture they are trying to "help".

I've never given a book one star before but this book took me forever to get through. I kept looking for excuses to anything else and I genuinely didn't enjoy it.

It was hard to swallow the naïveté of the protagonist.

I didn't love this as much as Amy Waldman's first novel, The Submission, which I was crazy for and felt didn't get as much attention as it deserved. In this one, I thought the characters were well-developed and complex, and the premise was good but I felt like it took Parveen way too long to figure out what was going on, and the whole thing kind of dragged for me. And that ending! Not my favorite.

Thank you to Little, Brown and Company and NetGalley for the advanced copy!

I recognized what this book was trying to do, and I think it excelled in shedding light on the lives of everyday Afgahnis living in a remote village. However, the plot seemed a little heavy-handed and missing some nuance especially surrounding the fictional book that this book is about.