Each snowflake was a sigh heard by an aggrieved woman somewhere in the world. All the sighs drifted up the sky, gathered into clouds, then broke into tiny pieces that fell silently on the people below. As a reminder of how women suffer. 
 A Thousand Splendid Suns was one of the best and most meaningful books I have probably ever read in 16 years of life because it embodies all the themes and values regarding gender identity and disparity that has been much debated by society for a long time. 
 I'd like to start off by saying that I absolutely, absolutely loved this book. With every page I read my heart was in my mouth and my stomach felt like it would drop to my shoes any moment. But I loved this book. I loved this book. It is a beautiful and enlightening story filled to the brim with hope, even beneath the painful, heart-wrenching emotional rawness of it. How strange, because this was a book where I dared not to turn the page, but I kept flipping and breaking my own heart anyway. 
 "A man's heart is a wretched, wretched thing. It isn't like a mother's womb. It won't bleed. It won't stretch to make room for you." 
 A Thousand Splendid Suns tells of the oppression of women in Afghanistan and the injustice with which they are treated. Of how their only way to social status and approval is to bear a male heir. Mariam, one of the main characters, is one of the saddest characters in literature. Born a bastard child to a very wealthy man, she has faced being called "harami" (an insult) her whole life, been shunned and discriminated and thought of as ignorant and worthless for her whole life, even by her own birth father and her family. Finally, she is married off to a man named Rasheed, who is violent, rude, abusive and just plain mean (Honestly, I wanted to kick him in the face throughout the whole book). He sees her only as a tool for breeding his heirs and mistreats, r*pes and severely abuses her, when it is found out that she is sterile. 
 But despite life being, for the most part, unfair to her, and despite facing nothing but hardship her whole life, Mariam's personality is so beautiful that it completely broke my heart. Unfazed by the betrayal of almost everyone she knows and the misfortune that she is constantly granted, Mariam remains resigned, but most of all an extremely resilient, selfless, humble, and kind person. When Rasheed takes a second wife, Laila, the two women despise each other at first, but soon unite against their husband's verbal and physical and emotional abuse. Mariam, being self-sacrificial, often tried to protect Laila and bore the brunt of Rasheed's anger. 
 The book ended in the most heartbreaking way possible and yet it was so fitting to Mariam's utterly stoic, compassionate and sacrificial personality that I just sat there and bawled. I couldn't help it. I somehow knew in my bones that Mariam would make the ultimate sacrifice - (view spoiler)[ to turn herself in to the Taliban and be sentenced to death (hide spoiler)] so that Laila and her children could go free and find happiness with Laila's soul mate, Tariq. I loved Mariam then, loved her because she was a flower even with all the acid that life had thrown at her; she'd never let her kindness wilt, and at the end she was thinking of not her own, but Laila's happiness. I didn't stop crying for days. And I'm writing this review almost 4 months late but I'm now crying as I write it. 
 Mariam wished for so much in those final moments. Yet as she closed her eyes, it was not regret any longer but a sensation of abundant peace that washed over her. She thought of her entry into this world, the harami child of a lowly villager, an unintended thing, a pitiable, regrettable accident. A weed. And yet she was leaving the world as a woman who had loved and been loved back. She was leaving it as a friend, a companion, a guardian. A mother. A person of consequence at last. No. It was not so bad, Mariam thought, that she should die this way. Not so bad. This was a legitimate end to a life of illegitimate beginnings. 
 Suffice it to say that I was a complete wreck after reading this. I'm still a complete wreck. 
 I thought at first that A Thousand Splendid Suns would be a book of brutality and depression - but it is not. It is a tale of hope and the beauty of the human spirit, and the resilient strength of the two female main characters in this story made me truly realise that what defines a woman are her actions and values, and nothing else. 
 "Like a compass needle that points north, a man's accusing finger always finds a woman. Always."