Raganathan said “every book it’s reader.” I’m sorry that I was not it for this book; I could not read more than about one-third. It is written well, but it portrays an Afghani-American woman, a recent college graduate, casting about for her life’s trajectory when she has an opportunity to travel to a small and remote Afghani village that had been portrayed in a book written by an American doctor who established a clinic named for a woman who died in childbirth. Parveen is unbelievably naive and the villagers too stereotypical for my liking. I’m sure the book will find its enthusiastic readers.

A poignant & important story. I really enjoyed the writing & the characters. I was invested in the character's as soon as I started reading this book. I look forward to reading & discussing with one of my book clubs later this year or early next year. There's so much to discuss about this book that it would make an ideal book club selection.

Parveen is a young Afghan-American who takes it into her head to go to Afghanistan to help the women in a rural community there. She’s inspired by a best seller, a memoir of a male American doctor who starts a women’s clinic in this same village. With no training, she is not met with the enthusiasm she expected. It’s immediately apparent how different life is here, from the most basic things to huge philosophical differences.

At the beginning, I had trouble finding Parveen a sympathetic character. She’s an idealist, and a stupid one at that. What was enlightening was listening to the female doctor. She pointed out how stupid and idealistic most Americans are. What good is an operating room without anesthesiologists, follow up care, etc.? “Perhaps idealism was an experiment whose variables couldn’t be controlled.”

This book took awhile to grow on me. Parveen took a while to grow on me. She gives Crane, the author of the book, the benefit of the doubt for much longer than I would. But when the Americans arrive and want to pave the road leading into the village, she alone has the value of insight into each culture.

The book shines a huge spotlight on our naivety when it comes to wanting to impose our standards on other cultures. I envision this book being a big favorite for book clubs. In fact, I would recommend it to anyone looking for something different to discuss.

My thanks to netgalley and Little, Brown for an advance copy of this book.

Any Walkman has written an eye opening novel of Afghanistan after 9/11 A story of the country the people their survival.A story of a young girl who is in Afghanistan on a humanitarian mission.A book to read to fall into to share with friends.An award winning novel.#netgalley #littlebrown

All fiction is lies. I’m comfortable with this. But when I read Amy Waldman’s brillian novel, A Door in the Earth, I realized that I have a rule about this that I didn’t know I had before. I’m comfortable with lies when I know they’re lies. I don’t like liars if I don’t know they’re liars. (This explains why, to this day, I still loathe James Frey and Greg Mortenson.) The protagonist of this novel, Parveen Shamsa, has to learn how to discern truth from lies the hard way when she follows a story to Afghanistan, to do something great like the author of Mother Afghanistan. She is warned by everyone from her favorite professor to her family and friends, but she goes anyway, only to discover that her hero was not so heroic.

Parveen arrives in the village where Dr. Gideon Crane had the life-changing experience that led to his writing Mother Afghanistan and setting up a foundation to build clinics for women in rural villages without any kind of Western health care. It’s a noble goal and Parveen wants to be a part of that. She’s not a doctor or nurse. She has a bachelor’s degree in anthropology and vague plans to do some kind of follow up on all the good Crane’s project must have done. Except, when she gets there, Parveen discovers that the clinic is only open once a week, the sole doctor has never been paid, and a lot of confused villagers who don’t recall Crane’s visit the way it’s depicted in Mother Afghanistan.

I found Parveen equally endearing and exasperating. On the one hand, it’s hard to fault someone who really does want to go good for others. She’s curious, which appeals to me, and stubborn enough to secure funding and escorts to get to the middle-of-nowhere Afghani village. But on the other hand, Parveen is very naive. It takes her a long time to stop thinking about Crane like a messiah and finally listen to what people tell her in response to her odd (to them) questions. Slowly, Parveen learns not just that Crane is a fraud, but also bigger lessons about the futility of trying to “save” people with gestures that lack the infrastructure and education to make them bear out. I’ve seen a lot of other characters learn this lesson the hard way, as in The Far Field, by Madhuri Vijay, perhaps because this is the kind of lesson that can only be learned the hard way. Idealism has to be balanced with pragmatism. Above all, the desire to do good has to be tempered by the humility to truly learn about the people one wants to help.

As I read A Door in the Earth, I was also reminded of Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams. Jamison talked about the performativity of empathy. For a lot of us, being seen to do good is as important (or more) than actually doing good. If we can make other people believe that we are good, then maybe we can become good in spite of our more selfish behavior. This desire is what drives Crane, so much so that he invents an entire personal mythology for himself. This kind of think is also represented in the novel by General Trotter, who wants to “win hearts and minds” by building a road to the village regardless of what the locals want or the problems it will cause. Trotter is more interested in doing “good” for the audience back home in America that he runs roughshod over the Afghanis, with disastrous consequences. Parveen, as she wises up and starts to let go of her rigid black and white thinking, is witness to a lot of bad behavior done in the name of good. It rattles her deeply, even if we readers might not find it so surprising.

While I have seen some of the ideas in A Door in the Earth before, I don’t want to give the impression that this book is unoriginal or derivative. I loved this book a lot. In fact, I hope I can pursue a lot of readers to pick it up because it has so much to say about things like charity, cultural understanding, the occasional futility of idealism, hope, truth and lies, corruption, and unintended consequences. It also makes Afghanistan come to life in a way that I’ve never seen before. Waldman does incredible work recreating a complex culture in an even more complex juncture in history. This book is pure brilliance.

Incomprehensibly good! I was shocked by how much I absolutely adored this novel. 5+ stars! Beautifully written. I will remember these characters for years. I'd recommend this to anyone looking for an intelligent timely read. I'm looking forward to picking up more of Amy Waldman's work!

"...the muscle of moral superiority can be a pleasurable one to exercise."

This is an absorbing novel set in post 9/11 Afghanistan. An Idealistic young woman travels there inspired by a memoir of a humanitarian. She gets to experience the miss truths that inevitably guide most conflicts.

I would highly recommend! Would be an excellent book club selection.

I really learned a lot about Afghanistan, our presence, the culture, and more from this excellent story! Many things to think about. A great deal of questions along with the information. Reminds me of the Kite Runner but with a different family. One of my favorite reads of 2019. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

A poignant, thoughtful, intelligent look into a country and a woman's path there. Amy Waldman's portrait is enthralling...and haunting.

This one was a real disappointment. I feel like it is a thinly veiled platform for analysis and commentary on current affairs and social issues at the expense of well-crafted fiction. There is so much telling and very little showing.

Writing: 4.5/5 Plot: 4/5 Characters: 5/5

A beautifully written novel that captures the heart and complexity of life in rural Afghanistan. 21-year old Parveen is an Afghani American whose parents escaped the country in 1998. Inspired by the best-selling memoir “Mother Afghanistan” by Dr. Gideon Crane, Parveen decides she wants to “help.” She arranges through Crane’s Foundation to visit the village featured in the book and in which a state of the art clinic for women’s health has been built. An anthropology student, Parveen plans to investigate the “structural reasons and power dynamics” that explain why so many Afghani women are dying. However, once established in the village, she is repeatedly surprised by how very different reality is from that described in the book.

The narrative is equal parts external description — the stunning landscape, the people, the events — and internal evolution as she learns more about her privileged status as an American and how very abstract her interests are compared to the reality of what is needed.

Well-developed characters represent a variety of factions and opinions — Berkeley Anthropology Professor Bannerjee, with whom Parveen corresponds, maintains a liberal, but abstract and condescending view of the Afghani people; Lt Col Trotter, representing the US military, believes in the military goals to help the Afghan people and yet faces ever increasing resistance from the locals; Afghani Aziz interprets for the US military, desperate to keep his job and simultaneously keep things from blowing up. All treat the truth as something to be manipulated — Trotter explains that “war was about controlling the story as much as the territory”; Aziz does not interpret exactly but manipulates statements to be more acceptable to the other; Banerjee thinks nothing of betraying Parveen for the “greater good”; and Crane invented half of his “memoir” in order to sell books and inspire donations.

The writing is beautiful and well put together. The memoir style allows multiple layers to be exposed simultaneously — observations of the village and its inhabitants are simultaneously overlaid with anthropological commentary and Parveen’s exposition on her own growing awareness. I particularly appreciated the insightful and multi-faceted commentary about Americans on the global stage — motivations, approaches, and the sad contrast between laudable aims and failing implementations.

Overall, while I did not find this book uplifting or inspiring I did find it deeply educating. Highly recommended.

Good quotes:
“It bothers you Americans that the world is the way it is, doesn’t it?”

“The first time he’d met Dr. Gideon, he said, he also had to give his story. Americans collected and offered them like they were business cards.”

“In moments of clarity she understood that the village was a backdrop against which Americans played out their fantasies of benevolence or self-transformation or, more recently, control. She was as guilty of this as Trotter or Crane. She’d come to play at being an anthropologist, and play was all it had been, because at some point, without much thought, she’d set all her anthropological work aside.”

“The urge to intervene, a high of its own, was a hard habit to break. Salvation could become an addiction, too.”

“Fiction disguised as nonfiction in the service of justice had a long and noble history. Abolitionists had invented or amplified escape slave narratives to dramatize their cause…”

And yet she read on, recognizing that the muscle of moral superiority can be a pleasurable one to exercise. Perhaps Crane, in making this warty presentation of himself, understood that too.”

“It was her first awareness that perhaps there is no self, no core, unshaped by others. From the moment we’re conscious that we’re being viewed, we’re being molded.”

“ ‘What I am here to learn is why so many women in Afghanistan are dying. Without understanding the structural reasons, without tackling the power dynamics that prevent women from having a voice, let alone proper health care, nothing will change.’ She was feeling proud of this declamation and the doctor nodded, as if she were agreeing, then said, ‘At the end of a labor, Parveen, a woman lives, or she dies. That is all that concerns me.’ ”

“To be female here was to grasp at scraps of information and sew them into the shape you imagined reality to be. Into fictions, patterned on distortions and inventions. The women needed an accurate understanding of the peril in which they lived — and the reasons for it.”

“She had, within sight, something fundamental, and also painful. which was that to be an adult was to have to make decisions and take actions that might be wrong. That might cause harm. To live was to bruise, the doctor seemed to be saying: there was no other way. Unlike Professor Banerjee or Gideon Crane, Dr. Yasmeen projected no certainty about the right path to take, the one that would avoid error and hurt; indeed, she seemed skeptical there was such a path. She didn’t think that all the answers could be had, much less claim to have them herself.”

“The digitized faces, fingerprints, and irises of men who’d never left these mountains would live perpetually in a DC suburb. Eternal life of another kind.”

Rating: 4.0/5.0

Genre:
Literary/Contemporary

Synopsis:
Parveen Shamsa is an Afghan American girl, a recent college graduate who decides to go to Afghanistan (The land of her family & ancestors). This decision was taken after she read and got obsessed with the bestselling book "Mother Afghanistan", a memoir written by humanitarian Gideon Crane. When she arrives there she will make lots of discoveries about the book, the author and this whole war which makes her think in a different way. Through the story, Parveen will meet many other characters, listen to their stories and understand all their hardship during these difficult times.

Book Structure:
This is a well-structured book. It is divided into three parts and 28 chapters. There are 400 pages and the story is narrated in the third person's perspective. Sometimes this becomes a book in a book because the main character reads the book Mother Afghanistan to the other characters.

Pros:
- This is an extremely serious subject that the story tackles. The war in Afghanistan. Some people call it a war and others term it as an occupation. The subject is very relevant to everybody and the story does not side with one party but it tells the point of view of all parties, the Afghans, American soldiers and also the ones who are stuck in between like Parveen in this story.

"So any of us could be killed, if we don't follow the Americans' orders. If we drive too fast, or too slow. If we don't hear them and choose not to listen. If we're in the wrong place" Jamshid

"In that statement was a history every Afghan knew- a history of imperial armies that had attempted to conquer and subdue Afghanistan. The British. The Soviets. And now, the Americans"

I love how the author had treated this subject throughout the book, especially in the eyes of the protagonist. She arrived there as this young college graduate, maybe a little naive thinking what Dr. Gideon was the absolute truth, but later the reader gets to see how this young lady matures and have a better understanding to all her current surroundings and dangers.

- Excellent atmosphere. Great writing that takes you with Parveen to Afghanistan. With the character, you will see the beauty of nature through her eyes and you will also feel all the difficulties and dangers she will face there.

- Varied characters: This is another thing I really appreciate about the book that the author has created so many characters, they are all different. She gave them different identities, motives, and goals. You will not get confused as a reader even if you are not very familiar with the names.

"If I was shot, would anyone remember me? Or would they leave me behind?" Aziz

"This marriage between us and the Americans was arranged, and my feelings about it don't matter" Dr. Yasmeen

Cons:
- I would not consider this a big con but I wish there was more about Parveen and her own family. We get to know about her family members and her mother's illness and demise but still, I wish there was a little more about that side of hers.

Final Thought:
"It is not the inability to breathe that you must fight, but the fear of the inability to breathe" Crane
Amy Waldman has done a tremendous job in creating this beautiful novel. You are set up to be taken to Afghanistan with Parveen and see what is happening there, live it all with her. This is a great achievement for an author to be able to do, to make you live inside her story. A story that is still going on there on a daily basis. Bring back the soldiers home, the Americans has no business to do in Afghanistan.
A Door in the Earth will be released on August 27th, 2019. Don't hesitate in grabbing it.

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for providing me with an advanced reading copy of this book in return for this honest and unbiased review.

Young Afghan American Parveen Shamsa travels to her family’s land after recently graduating from college and reading the gut-wrenching bestseller Mother Afghanistan. She arrives to the poor-stricken and secluded village where Dr. Gideon Crane’s traumatic events happened years before, leading him to write the remarkable memoirs. As Parveen meets and befriends with the villagers, she soon discovers the discrepancies between the book and the facts of what really happened to him, to Fereshta who died in childbirth, and to the clinic which was built in her memory.
This novel is a powerful tale about the power of misinformation, of political lies, with a marvelous country and simple, beautiful people in the backdrop.
Thanks to NetGalley and Little Brown and Company for the advance copy.

One of my favorite novels of 2019. Amy Waldman opens a door into contemporary Afghanistan in this character-driven literary novel. The author worked as a journalist reporting for the New York Times from their South Asia bureau. Details of life and conflict when the Americans try to build a new road to a remote village ring with truth and heartbreak. Main character is recent UC Berkeley grad Parveen, who was born in Kabul but raised in California. Parveen craves connection with her cultural roots and also seeks to improve women's health. Her naiveté collides with realities of American occupation, insurgent activism, women's lives, and traditional practices. Highly recommended! Will be popular with book groups.

4.5 [How I wish for that 1/2 star!]

I Loved <i>The Submission</i> so was thrilled to be approved to read Amy Waldman's new book pre-pub. I was not disappointed.

Post 9/11.

Parveen, a female, 22-year old Afghan-American student in medical anthropology at UC Berkeley, is so moved by Gideon Crane's book <i>Mother Afghanistan</i> that she decides to travel to the remote village of Crane's memoir. She wants to assist in the efforts there to improve women's healthcare [in a clinic he set up]. The clinic was in honor of [repentence for? Fereshta, late wife of Waheed. [There is much about this situation in the book]. Parveen is plunked into Waheed's family--many children and multiple wives.

Many well-drawn characters--Waheed, Azia, Jamshid, Issa, Dr. Yasmeen, Colonel Trotter, Bina, Shokoh, and more--each with an interesting story.

And so it begins, A real eye opener for Parveen and for me--this is a multi-layered, thought-provoking novel. So many levels and issues to think about. Power, perspective, idealism. What is truth?

Parveen soon discoverss that much of Crane's memoir is fiction. Why?

Some of the topics to ponder:
Translators--what to leave in/alter/take out. How to represent various situations. For what purpose?

The US Army. Americans vs. Afghani culture; what is their role. What is appropriate? Are roads beneficial or not? And, for whose benefit?

The Afghan culture--how women are treated. The role of women.

Once I got into the rhythm of this book [not so at the start], I didn't want to put it down. In the blurb, there is a teaser about having to make a decision about loyalties. Thankfully, it didn't come til near the end and though there were some hints, it didn't spoil it for me.

Some of the passages or phrases I noted as being incredibly descriptive or provocative/evocative:

"...the muscle of moral superiority can be a pleasurable one to exercise."

"...sealed in her green polyester envelope" [chadri]

"Pleats of sun fell through stone-gray clouds.,"

"...face piebald with shadow and light"

"Villagers lives and passings were registered only in the Department of Memory, a compassionate but mercurial bureaucracy."

And I learned two new words:

bricolage and perfervid

Not sure about the ending, but not too abrupt or neat, and not sure how I would have done.

Recommend.

You learn a great deal about the dismal state of affairs with maternity care, and health care in general, in Afghanistan during the post 9/11 era. Waldman does a great job of placing readers into this remote village as we follow our young, idealistic main character, Parveen Shamsa, a recent graduate with a degree in medical anthropology, who sets off to volunteer in this rural village after being inspired by a fictional novel of this place. She leaves her fiancé behind in Berkeley as she sets off to this village, where she learns midwifery skills to help the female doctor who makes a dangerous trek to periodically take care of the locals. I did get a bit tired of all the excerpts from the fictional novel, but understand that they were included to give the readers the backstory of the political, historical, and religious events of Afghanistan, but at times, the excerpts broke away from the gripping narrative and what was actually happening in this village.

For those who want a compelling read, a page turning intimate historical novel ...
with elegant style and thoughtful insight....this is THAT NOVEL!

I absolutely loved it!!!!!
Amy Waldman’s unblinking look at medical patient care in Afghanistan-post-9/11 era, one of the poorest healthcare systems in the world - unfamiliar with western practices - is astounding and ambitious. We look at misunderstandings, mistreatment, and misdiagnosis.

Amy Waldman considers the issues particular to women in Afghanistan....examines the complexities of global development - the changing role of women in non-Western cultures - ethical controversies- in A REMOTE AFGHAN MOUNTAIN VILLAGE!

There was so much that I related to in this novel. The storytelling filled in holes from my own experiences of living in Berkeley- being a student at Cal - then leaving the country to travel the world for the next two years. In the early 70’s, I, too, traveled to Afghanistan. Many memories were brought back to me - both in Waldman’s detailed descriptions in Berkeley and Afghanistan.
I’ve never forgotten those breathtaking mountains and Afghanistan.... colors changing from browns and greens to lavender and purple and smoky blues. It’s an
incredible sight.

Amy Waldman mentions ‘The Hippie Trail” during the 1970’s. Most of us Westerners who took it - definitely - didn’t have a name for it at the time. But history gave it the right label. I was fascinated that this story was written post 9/11.
She filled in historical understanding for me.

The main character- Parveen Shamsa - a College Senior -studied medical anthropology…which looked at how people in other cultures treated medical problems.
She says:
“I had assumed Kabul would be a hardship. I wasn’t prepared for its comfort, it’s mix of decadence and familiarity.
In the 1970s, it had been a stop on the “Hippie Trail”,
the overland route that young Westerners took from Europe to South Asia.
The mere name evoked a loose-limbed morality. Now, in the long wake of 9/11, it was inhabited by a new round of expats, do-gooders, and profiteers, three groups which proved not to mutually exclusive categories”.

Parveen’s inspiration to go to Afghanistan in the first place, was from a memoir she read, ( fictional for this novel’s purpose), called “Mother Afghanistan”, by Gideon Crane. The deeper w get into the storytelling...Parveen Discovers fabrications, lies, coverups, Major discrepancies from her experiences in village than what Crane wrote in his book.

Not everything was cozy comfortable when Parveen arrived in Kabul....unless you consider it - ha - comfortable being driven by a stranger -Issa - on an unmarked and unpaved road - single dirt lane - in a Land Cruiser bouncing over peddles - traveling this way for two days - and hungry.
Parveen slept in one room - on a bedroll of straw with only one hanging lightbulb- in a room with other women and children and goats.
No cell service, internet, computers, television...
(And coffee??)....
One room...for sleeping and eating, that everyone, (adults, 9 kids, and animals), shared together.
During the day they stacked the bedrolls in a corner.
In the compound yard - were three goats, a handful of chickens, four cows, and a donkey. Piles of hay, a vegetable garden, a pomegranate tree, an outhouse, manure.

Eventually- Parveen ‘paid’ for her own room - valuing solitary. Over time, she questioned Western solitary confinement.

The village that Parveen arrived at wasn’t the most conservative part of the country, yet married women still had to cover themselves - wear the chadri- over their heads.
“The Village had no visual clutter. No billboards, no advertisements, no graffiti. No names on street signs, no numbers on the homes. The village was washed clean of words. Most of them didn’t know how to read, and anyway they didn’t seem to need such guidance and the village where they’d live their whole lives”

One of the characters we meet is Shokoh. She was a city girl - a teenage - educated with desires to study more. She lost her loving mother - and gained a ruthless stepmother.
“Her father had sold her, in her words, into a life where there were no books to read, no paper to write on, no pencils to hold, only cow teats to grip. She was married to a man who was not only too old, but was so illiterate and dirty, who smelled of the fields and could poke his corncob in her whenever he wanted, which was often”.

The characters and dialogue are what gives this book so much intimacy.
You’ll meet, ‘Dr. Yasmeen’, ( the lady doctor)...who worked at medical clinic....and learn why it’s called “Fereshta’s House”.
When we first meet tough-cookie ‘Bina’, she is breast-feeding and kneading bread at the same time.
You’ll be introduced to Mullah’s. Mosque leaders, vicar, or master guardian - used in the Quran.
You’ll meet the kids, and I can’t imagine anyone not falling in love with nine-year-old,
Jamshid: He lost a hand in an accident .....also lost his first mother ( Fereshta). Bina becomes his new mother.
We meet Waheed who was first married to Fereshta who had been gracious and warm.. Bina ....( she’s a character to grow ‘with’....a character I grew to appreciate and understand deeper in time).

We really get to know the characters - many more I haven’t mentioned....their stories - and the ( some painfully disturbing) - trials and tribulations — with the Afghani civilians, and American soldiers ...bringing new light on the war.

The reader is left to contemplate two decades of war and how it’s rendered the healthcare in Afghanistan, Poor roads and transportation, a weak economy, lack of education, lack of physicians and nurses....
But also look at the Afghani culture around religion ( Islam), and family.
What happens when Americans bring their Western wisdom? We look at morality.. and more than one philosophical perspective on what’s right and what’s wrong.

Engrossing reading...and essential to our times!

Thank you, Netgalley, Little Brown and Company, and Amy Waldman