I’m in Afghanistan with the women and their complicated lives

Some years ago I read The Little Coffee Shop of Kabul about an American woman who opened a café and the people who worked there and their customers. I read it but it wasn’t a favourite and I thought no more of it until I received a copy of Return to the Little Coffee Shop of Kabul in my monthly book subscription. It’s been lingering on the piles for a while so I thought that I would read it as part of this challenge.

In this story the American woman, Sunny, has returned home with the man she met in the first book and left the coffee shop to be run by her ex-employees. The story alternates between the USA where Sunny is widowed unexpectedly and has to find a new life for herself, and Afghanistan where there is social unrest and increasing violence.

In the USA Sunny hosts a young woman from Kabul and also finds a new Afghani friend. She tackles her grief and the longing that she has to return to Afghanistan as well as coping with starting a new business and trying to mediate between two young women who have very different lifestyles.

In Kabul the couple running the shop are expecting a baby. Their elderly mother is learning to drive, which is almost unheard of in her culture, and the café shelters a young couple who have run away from an arranged marriage. Violence in the city is always present and there is a feeling that the coffee shop will not be able to remain open for long.

This book was written before the American withdrawal and it has a air of hope that things will be getting better for the inhabitants of Kabul despite the rise of the Taliban – apparently there is a third book which revisits the coffee shop at and after the time of the rise to power of the Taliban.

The author knows how to structure and tell a good story and this book is very readable. The problem for me is that I felt that it was written by checklist. Every problem that could affect people in this area was covered – arranged marriages, honour killings, bride prices and dowries, covering the hair or not, women obeying their husbands, the division of men and women in society, the leadership of men, and the problem of adapting to a Western viewpoint. All these things are important but I did feel that the author was trying to get as many ideas into the book as possible, maybe at the expense of the characters. I also resented the fact that when there is a problem Sunny gets her rich American friend to sort everything out for her.

I didn’t hate this book and it is good that these issues are explored in our reading material although perhaps with less sentimentality. I will pass this book on to a new reader.