I loved Khaled Hosseini's other two books and anxiously awaited this one. Unfortunately I found this one frustrating. 
 It started out great with an awesome fable and the story that followed was great. Unfortunately, too many new characters were introduced that had little added value to the story and really made the whole thing quite confusing. 
 Maybe some day I'll read it again and try to figure out what some of the side stories had to do with anything, but I wasn't in the mood to work that hard when I read it this time.