And The Mountains Echoed

I just finished Khaled Hosseini's third novel And The Mountains Echoed.  He's a good writer.  I enjoyed The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns which he wrote before this one.  This story doesn't track as well as the first two.  It's more of a series of short stories than one long tale.  Much of the story is about sibling relationships.  A brother and sister combination begin the novel and end the novel.  Many of the other characters in the story are related to this brother or this sister but not all of them are.  Put together, this puzzle of individual stories paints a vivid picture of life in Afghanistan from the 1960's to present day.  If you can get past the confusion of not knowing how all the characters are related I think you would enjoy this story very much. The characters he creates are real and complex.  Some characters are more likeable but all of them are flawed in some way.  Khaled Hosseini, a novelist and a physician, must be a good student of human nature.