Skip to main content

The Little Coffee Shop of Kabul - A Review


(4 of 2021) ft. my Morning wali Chai Shireen 
📚 
‘The Little Coffee Shop of Kabul’ by Deborah Rodriguez - This is my last book from the trilogy of Central Asian themed books that I ordered last year. The book is based in Afghanistan and is a self-proclaimed Khaled Hosseini inspired Feminist war drama.
🏔️
It is a story of 5 female characters - Sunny, Yazmina, Isabel, Candace and Halajan who are of different age groups and hail from different ethnic, cultural and financial backgrounds. All of them carry their own skeletons in the cupboard, but how they affect and enrich the lives of each other in a war torn and Taliban ruled Kabul is the pivotal plot. 
👩🏻‍🦰👩🏻‍🦳👩🏻‍🦱👵🏼👩🏽
Coming to the review, do not expect the narration to have depth and detail of a deft writer. Sometimes the actions seem too abrupt and ill-thought in the book. Many connections appear forced or, for the lack of a better word, inorganic. The language lacks the subtlety and refinement and is unable to convey the true feeling of the characters or of a situation many times. It could have been written in a more detailed and nuanced manner, but, as I said, the author can be given liberty seeing that she is not a professional author and this is second of her Biographical type of fiction works.
💖
Talking about the male characters, there are many characters like Rashif, Bashir Hadi (who had to be a Hazara, seeing the Khaled Hosseini obsession of Deborah) and, maybe, Jack who could have been explored more and would have given more richness to the story. But I guess the author wanted to go for a more female oriented plot. The readers may like the romantic plot between Halajan and her lover (who I will not reveal here because I am trying to give out minimal spoilers). Sunny tries hard but fails to touch your hearts.
📖
During my research on the book and the author, I found that Deborah has a history as interesting as the book having spent years in Afghanistan as a hairdresser and marrying a local Afghan after 20 days of courtship. You will see the reflection of the author in Sunny if you look too closely. 
🤓
Also, one more thing - the publication I read had amazing Afghan recipes for desserts and Chai (both Chai Shireen and Chai Talk) at the end. I thoroughly enjoyed reading them. So if you are planning on buying the book, I would highly recommend the one published by Sphere.
☕🍵
The book is a decent read for the ones who want to start reading, Afghanistan enthusiasts like Yours Truly or if you are not in the mood for serious reading. Or desperately missing more works from Khaled Hosseini. 
♥️
Rating (Yaw.. Daw.. Drei..) 3/5 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Delhi Through the Seasons

Good books I just dive into.  But better books I save for good occasions. Like this one, that I saved for my trip to the mountains. 🌸 'Delhi through the seasons' by Khushwant Singh 🌸 Having aptly been called the modern Barahmaaha, with a theme of nature, DTTS talks about the rotating wheel of seasons in Delhi and North India, in general. Having been written by the maestro Khushwant, based on his diary entries and his observations as a bird watcher (it was a surprise for me too to find another feather in his hat), it addresses one aspect that all other Barahmaaha treatises of the past chose to ignore - nature - flowers and birds and animals. I'm not an outdoorsy person per se, and my meagre knowledge of flowers and trees is something I've given up my hope on. But thanks to the divine illustrations by Suddhasattwa Basu, I felt as if I was sitting in Lodi Gardens while reading this one, surrounded by fragrance and chitterings.  🌸 So read this one to get to k...
Post a Comment
Read more

Sputnik Sweetheart - A Book Review

"Why do people have to be this lonely? What's the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?" 🛰️ 'Sputnik Sweetheart' by Haruki Murakami 🛰️ Does it ever happen that you like an author's work very much, so much that you dread reading other works fearing you might lose the charm by overexposure, or the author may not be able to live up to the last work? Or am I the only weird one? I'm kinda sure 🤓 that it's the latter. I loved Murakami last when I read 'Kafka on the Shore' 4 years back. But then I dropped the idea of doing  a Murakami spree. But last week, I watched Prajakta Koli and Babil Khan talk about their book preferences and Sputnik Sweetheart came up. I had to pick it up. 🛰️ SS is a love triangle. A lonely love triangle. Lonely because the story has hardly any other charac...
Post a Comment
Read more