01/10/2026
I closed this book four days ago and I've been trying to write this review ever since. Kept starting and stopping because I couldn't figure out how to explain what it did to me. How it took my comfortable low-grade guilt about my sister whom I haven't spoken in three months and made it urgent. How it showed me that time doesn't wait, that people can be lost while they're still alive, that someday is how you wake up realizing someone is gone and you never said the things you meant to say.
Abdullah and Pari are siblings. Three and ten when their father walks them into the desert and comes back with only one of them. He tells the boy his sister died. Tells the girl her past doesn't exist. And I'm sitting here, thinking about that moment. About how a father's desperation becomes a child's lifetime of searching for something he can't name. About how you can lose someone without them dying. About how separation is its own kind of murder except the body keeps breathing and you have to live knowing they're out there somewhere, unreachable.
There is not one narrator you can trust in this book. Hosseini gives you a dozen, each telling their version of events, each one convinced they're telling the truth. And slowly you realize: everyone in this book is lying. Protectively. Editing reality to make it survivable. To make their choices look like necessity instead of cowardice. To transform their pain into someone else's fault.
Pari's father sells her to save his other children. That's his story. He's the tragic hero making an impossible sacrifice. But his wife tells it differently, says he was weak, chose the easy violence over the hard work of finding another way. And the wealthy woman who buys Pari tells herself she's saving a child from poverty, that money makes her the righteous one. She tells this story so many times she almost believes it even though somewhere in her she knows. She knows.
And I started thinking about my own family stories. The ones we tell at holidays, polished smooth from repetition. About why my uncle doesn't come around anymore. About what happened to my aunt's first marriage. About the reasons we moved when I was seven. Everyone has a version. Everyone's version makes them look better than they probably deserve. And the truth is probably ugly and complicated and no one's completely innocent and no one's completely guilty and we'll die never knowing which pieces were real.
This scared me more than I want to admit. Because if everyone's lying, including me, especially me, then what do I actually know? About my life, about my choices, about the people I've hurt or saved or abandoned?
The book's structure feels wrong at first. You want to stay with Abdullah and Pari but Hosseini keeps pulling you away, showing you other people, other stories. There's Nabi, the servant who orchestrated the sale and spent fifty years justifying it. There's Markos, the doctor who buys Nabi's house and finds a letter. There's Idris, a wealthy Afghan-American who promises to help a girl and then ghosts her because actually helping is inconvenient. There's Pari's daughter who doesn't even know she's adopted.
And slowly you understand: this IS the story. One filled with messy web of people who brush against each other, who wound each other without meaning to, who love each other despite distance and time and forgetting. We're all just walk-ons in each other's movies. The person who changed your life might not remember your name. The choice you agonized over for weeks was forgotten by the person it affected most. We're all peripheral characters insisting we're protagonists.
Abdullah moved forward. Got married, had kids, emigrated to America, worked hard, built what looked like a decent life. But he was always looking for Pari. In every woman's face. In every memory that wouldn't come into focus. In the persistent, maddening feeling that he'd forgotten something crucial. He lived his whole life one person short.
There's a scene where grown-up Abdullah, old and sick with Alzheimer's, and his daughter finds an old photograph. Asks him who the people are. And he can't remember his wife's name, his daughter's name, his own name. But he looks at the photo, at a little girl, and says "Pari." With such certainty. Such love. Like her name is the only word he knows for sure. And I thought: isn't this what we become? The absences. The people we lost. The holes where someone should have been. We build our entire lives around the edges of these holes, careful not to fall in, and call it moving forward.
This book ends differently because Hosseini doesn't do what you expect. He doesn't reunite them in chapter three after some heartwarming misunderstanding. He doesn't even stay with them. He leaves. And you keep waiting. You keep thinking, "Okay, now we go back to Abdullah and Pari. Now they find each other." They don't. Or they do, but so late, so damaged, so unfairly that you want to throw the book across the room except you can't because your hands are shaking too hard.
What Hosseini understands and communicates beautifully that most writers won't touch is that life doesn't give you the reunion you earned. Sometimes you search for someone your whole life and when you finally find them, they look at you with empty eyes because dementia took what poverty and distance couldn't. Sometimes the people who loved you most forget they ever knew you. Sometimes you forget them. Sometimes you did everything right and it still isn't enough.
And truly, like the title suggest, Mountains echo. Nothing ever really stops. Every choice you make, to stay or leave, to fight or surrender, to hold on or let go, it echoes. Through your life. Through other people's lives. Through generations of people who'll never know your name but who'll carry the consequences of your decisions anyway.
I don’t know if I loved this book in the way people usually mean when they say that. But I know it left me softened. More patient. More aware of the invisible griefs people carry, that behind every functional adult is a child who lost something and learned to live anyway.
And here is what we can all do, I think. Remember when we can. Forgive when we can't. Keep reaching even though we'll probably miss. The mountains echo. Let's echo back. That has to be enough.
