A Door In The Earth

So I just finished this book yesterday, and it's one of the best books that I've read this year, coming in at the tail end. I like to give context for the specific way I experience books, and y'all know that I very rarely spend money on books, even though it should be becoming pretty apparent that I love to read. This one was no exception. I downloaded this on the Libby app in audiobook form and mostly listened to it on my commute to and from work. I love consuming books this way, because I have a decently long commute through winding backwoods mountain roads, living, as I do, in the largest mountain range on the planet, and right now this drive is particularly bad because 1: winter has come, and 2: the flood destroyed our road systems and they've not been fully repaired, and now they can't be fully repaired because road crews can't get out to backwoods eastern Kentucky in the snow and ice. We kept telling FEMA this was going to happen, because like, we live here and know how winter works, and though I'm really appreciative of everything they've done, the retaining walls, road repairs, and other environemental concerns that would impede travel, we're not their priority. And I get that. Their main priority was getting temporary housing to people before winter came so that they wouldn't freeze to death. I give you this context, because it probably affects my experience with this book. Because entertainment is subjective, and who I am as a person influences my experience with a story almost as much as how the story is written. Also like all my reviews, there will be spoilers for the entire book, because this is meant to be my experience with the book.

So let's talk about relatability, because it's a major theme in this book. This book is about this recent college grad, who decides to go to Afghanistan, which is where her parents are from, because she reads a book called Mother Afghanistan after going to a lecture at her college in Berkly, California, by the book's author. This is the main character, and I had a lot of trouble relating to her as a reader. This isn't because we don't share life experiences. I've been to college, I've been to guest lectures, I've had friends similar to the ones she talks about, etc. We have a lot of life experiences that would make her relatable. The difference is that she is a pure dick, and her entire mindset is that of a jackass, and I've never been that big of a jackass, so pretty much every thought in her head is completely foreign to me. It didn't take me out of the story, Jackasses exist, I just kept, the entire time I was reading this book, thinking that the bitch needed a good slap in the face. I've said multiple times when speaking of people like this, both in fiction and in real life, that I would love to take the people like this and drop them off in the head of a holler and see how long they survive. That's what this book is, straight up. It's an Afghan holler (literally, for those of you unfamiliar with Appalachian Regional Dialect, 'holler' is, in standard English 'hollow', or the hollow region in a mountain chain between 2 peaks, not short enough to be a vally but pleanty of room to go up or down), but a holler nonetheless. That's what this book is about, taking some jackass who thinks that they're hot shit and dropping them in the head of a holler and seeing how long they survive. It's awesome.

Now, due to this being the case, I related far more to the people who lived in the villiage in this holler way more than I did the American, which is wild, because I'm an American. And the main character, Parveen, kept doing rude-ass shit and saying that's how we do shit in the US, and it's just not. I kept thinking, "I don't want these people to think that this is how Americans are." She's so fucking pretentious and rude and stupid, and it's sure as shit not how I was raised. Like, imagine, me, driving through the biggest mountain range in the world, after a flood, on roads that were falling apart, while this bitch explains to me what a mountain is, because we don't have those in America. Explains to me what an outhouse is. Explains to me what it's like to have a goat eat your hair. Explains to me what it's like to get water out of a creek or whatever. The mountain one was buckwild, I remember this distinctly as I was listening to this book and driving, I was going around this giant hole left right before you hit the highway where one of the mudslides had hit, and Parveen said that, and I thought, "Bitch, ain't you from California? They got mountains there."

When I got to work, I had some free time to look it up, and... yeah they got mountains there. Why the fuck is this bitch acting like she's never seen a mountain. She literally grew up in the mountains. This is what they look like!

You know what a fucking mountain is! And those California mountains are actually nothing compared to the Appalachian mountains. It's just wild how she assumes that she's stupid because she's an American, rather than that she just, I guess never went outside in her life. She's just generally a dick, and dumb as hell.

So let's talk about this dude Crane, who's book inspired her to go to Afghanistan, against her dad's wishes, which is wild because her dad actually was an Afghan before immigrating to the US, so like, I don't know why she's taking some rando's word over his, they don't seem to have a bad relationship or anything. The motivation for this is never explained and it bothers me. But Crane is a douchebag lying theif, that's like, his whole thing. So like he was a doctor who embezzeled a shitton of money and cheated on his wife with a bunch of nurses, and one of the nurses found out that he was stealing everything and told the cops, then wore a wire and got him to talk about it, so he was arrested because you're not allowed to steal shittons of money from hospitals. I was gonna say, "here in the US," but I think that's true everywhere. But being rich he manages to avoid jail time by lawyering up real good, and winds up with community service, which he decides to do in Afghanistan. So he goes to be a doctor in Afghanistan, and then writes a book about his experiences there, and it becomes a best seller, and he finds Jesus or someshit and acts like he's reformed so he can do Ted Talks or whatever about how great he is for going and helping these poor people who are uneducated and shitty and need him to save them- and look, again, as a member of a broke-ass subculture I've met tons of these people, and if you read my secret diary, heard my reaction to them when I was in school. Fuck em. I'm sure as shit not going to be one of them as one of my classes wanted me to be. Voluncation my ass. Don't come here, do some bullshit, take some pictures for Facebook, and leave thinking about how great you are. Fuck you for that. So my impression of this guy was, "fuck him, he probably didn't do shit, probably built a well that collapsed a year later because he didn't hire locals and didn't know what the fuck he was doing and then came home and patted himself on the back about how great he was for helping those poor uneducated, unwashed masses." Like fuck this guy. I had an instant and large amount of hate.

It's so, so easy to actually help people. Don't bring a camera, don't go in thinking that you're hot shit because you could afford to go to school or whatever, just go in, ask, "Hey, what do y'all need? I got money and y'all said you was broke." and then just do what they say. That's it. That's all you gotta do. Like when the flood hit, I will be forever grateful for the people who did that. They came in, asked what we needed, and we said showers, generators, and somewhere to wash clothes. And water. Just shittons of water. And they gave us that, didn't take pictures, didn't ask me to pose with them, just gave us what we needed. They're out here doing the lord's work. But there were other people out here bringing cameras and doing stupid shit, like offering rides to the store to get food that you couldn't cook without clean water and electricity. Nobody needs that shit. That's nothing. That's just a way for you to pretend like you did something.

And Crane is one of the latter. So he builds a hospital with no consistant source of electricity and doesn't hire a staff. So now these people have a pretty building that does fuck all and he goes home and gives lectures and sells books. Fuck him. But for some reason Parveen is compeltely up his ass and I sincerely do not know why. It makes no sense at all. Dude is an adulterous criminal who is spouting bullshit and she just eats it up. And in the universe of this book so do the vast majority of Americans; it's a best seller and everybody acts like this dude who was literally arrested for lying can be trusted. The entire country is full of gullible dumbasses. Now, I'm a psychologist, not a socilogist, so maybe that's a real thing that happens, but Jesus Christ I hope not. This was so fucking stupid.

Anyway, Parveen wants to go to Afghanistan to help people like Crane did, so to do nothing, I guess. And people keep asking her what the fuck she's going to do and how she thinks she can help at all because like, at least Crane, shitty though he was, was a real doctor like his court ordered public service was to treat physical ailments as a doctor because he knew how to do that. She knows how to write anthropology papers in a villiage with a low literacy rate. She's fucking useless. Like the fuck does she think she's gonna do? And she says that she's gonna chronical the lives of women and then tell Americans about it. Which she thinks is something, but I've thought about it and I don't know that it is anything. Like I don't think that it's a lack of knowelge that is keeping everyday Americans from helping Afghan women. I've heard a lot of them speak, themselves, about how shitty Afghanistan is, and that's not what's keeping me from helping them, it's the like... not knowing waht the hell they want me to do, as a person. Like I don't speak Dari so even my skills as a psychologist would be pretty useless if I went to Afghanistan to try and be a psychologist there. It'd make way more sense to send somebody who knew how to speak the langauge. Which, Parveen does, but again, she's not a psychologist or anything so that's not super relevent. My point is that she doesn't have a plan, she just randomly goes to Afghanistan while her dad keeps telling her not to because he fled a warzone and he thinks it's pretty fucked up of her to go back to a place he escaped due to how dangerous it was because she read a book written by a known liar that probably isn't even true. Also her teacher tells her that, that Crane is a known liar who is probably just making shit up, but this teacher is also kind of a shitty person.

Crane tells this story about this woman who died in childbirth, this is what her teacher is talking about. This lady is named Fareshta (btw I might misspell everything in this story, I listened to it and I'm bad at spelling) died in childbirth. Crane says that he tried to save her and couldn't, so he built this hospital in her honor to help other women in her holler not die in childbirth. Which it could do if it had like, electricity and a staff, but let's not think too hard on it. So Parveen wants to stay with her family. Her man's name is Waheed and he has 2 new wives and 9 kids. So she goes to their house and INSTANTLY goes full dickbag when they expect her to sleep in the family's shared sleeping area and she tells them that she's too good to do that, for some reason. No idea why. Like they're broke as shit, Parveen, they ain't got a lot of rooms. Nobody in the family gets their own room, but you're better than them so you get your own room. I can't imagine being this rude. I felt the slap in the face that this family felt. Who the fuck does this bitch think she is?

So they put her in the barn and I laughed my ass off. That's good for her. Let her stay with the goats in the shit hay. I swear I laughed out loud. Learn her a lesson.

This first meeting with this family instantly endeered me to them and isolated me from Parveen, which is so weird, because, again, Parveen and I are the Americans! But I kept thinking, that if I was there for her I would have said something like, "I am so, so sorry about my friend's rudeness, I don't know what's wrong with her, of course we're happy to stay with you. Those twins are so cute! Where do you want us to put our stuff. Do y'all need any help with those bed rolls? No, darlin, let me get that, you got them younguns, you got enough on your plate. Your house is so well-kept, them babies are gorgeous! How are they holding up? Honey, how are you holding up, I know she was your sister. You sit down, you got too much on you." Context for this is that his second wife is the little sister of his first wife, Bala. But Parveen is just consistantly rude as hell.

This family is deeply religious, which makes sense because Afghanistan is high in religiosity, as is the Bible Belt where I'm from, so that makes perfect sense to me, it would be more learning the quirks of that particular religion. Wear a burka instead of maxi skirts and ball shoes type thing, but I got the basics of Abrahamic gender roles down so that's not gonna be a huge problem. But it is to Parveen, and I'll actually give her this one because she's Muslim herself so she knows more about it to criticize, but nobody's like, rude about it. They ask her if she wants a burka when she goes out and she says no, and that's pretty much the end of it.

So everybody in the villiage thinks that she's a doctor because she said that she came to help people and that's the help they actually need, so she has to tell people that she's not a doctor and everybody is like, "Well then why are you here? What are you gonna do to help?" And she says that she's going to write these stories and tell them to Americans and everybody had the reaction I did which is that that will probably do nothing and is pointless. Especailly when she actually goes to the clinic to meet the doctor who basically tells her that that's stupid and she's stupid for thinking it and she needs to scrub in and at least try and learn something not useless. Which she doesn't want to do because she says that blood makes her pass out.

So the second wife is like 16 because child marriage is a thing, and pretty consistantly pissed because she was living in a city with a school and when she got married in this arranged marriage she had to go to this little podunk nowhere holler and milk cows and shit when she had wanted to go to school, which Parveen actually sympathizes with in her first act in the entire book of not acting like a jackass. Her name is Shokoor, but I think I misspelled it. So the first wife gets aggravated with Shokoor real easy because she knows no redneck skills such as farm labor, cooking, sewing, etc, and thus is almost as useless as Parveen, despite their sister-wife relationship meaning that she's supposed to be Bala's second in command, she just keeps fucking shit up and it's everything Bala can do not to slap the shit out of her for dumbassery. Which Parveen is like, super pissed about, but like, this is subsistance farming, Bala ain't got time or patience for dumbassery. It's a shitty situation, but people legit die of dumbassery in that holler and I get that, way more than Parveen does. Again, this is not a huge culture shock. My subculture lived through getting paid in script, we are familiar with this situation. Parveen treats this as a huge culture shock and I do not know why. She's not rich. She lived in an apartment above a store and she seems confused by the concept of poor people. Maybe it's because she's never been in a rural area before or something but it's sure as shit not being American. American is not a synonym for jackass.

So this Crane guy represented the broke-assery of the villiage pretty well, which makes the US army think that it would be good PR to go build a road to the hospital. So they show up and meet with the villiage old men, because that's who runs shit, and also Parveen, because she just invites herself, and she notices that the translator is completely full of shit and brokers this bridge building deal by just lying about what people are saying. So she does call him on his bullshit. What they had actually said is that most backwoods holler people get violent when they get jealous, and if they build a road the folks in other villiages would get jealous of their cool new road and start getting shooty about it. But the translator told the army guy that they totally did want a road, and then told the villiagers that the army was gonna make a new road system with roads for everybody. He tells Parveen that he does shit like that all the time just to keep fights from starting.

So Parveen wants to read Cane's book to the villiage women, because she's so far up his ass for reasons that I don't understand, so she goes to the richest guy in the villiage to see if she can read to them in his walled in villa so the women can like, be out in public and not have US soldiers looking at them, because in their religion and culture that's a whole big thing. So the rich dude just kisses him for no reason. My response to that, like knee jerk, is to just slap the shit out of him, before I catch myself, but Parveen has more sense than that and knows you don't slap the shit out of powerful people who can probably beat you up, so she says that if he does it again she'll tell on him. This confuses the shit out of him because he doesn't know who she would tell, I guess forgetting that she's an American and there's American soldiers down the road, but he lets her use the villa. His whole deal was really confusing to me, but I think it's just because I'm unfamiliar with that kind of person, and that his character is meant to show the cultural difference. Parveen was experiencing the kind of sexual harassment that Afghan women have to put up with all the time, due to their lack of social power. So that's fucked up.

She starts reading this book to the women, some of whom are characters in it, and they start telling her that everything on those pages is complete bullshit. One woman gets madder than hell because the book accuses her husband and two of her kids, her eldest sons, of being in the Talaban, and she is straight up ready to whoop Parveen's ass for talking that way about her man and her kids. But Parveen explains to her that she didn't say it, Crane did, so now she wants to whoop Crane's ass and just says that he needs to never come back to their villiage because he's got an asswhooping waiting on him for running his mouth telling lies about her family.

This plays out, btw, like this comes up in a big way later, because the US soldiers ask the translator how much in Crane's book is true, since he was there, working for Crane, and he says all of it. But he said that because his English isn't actually good enough to be working as a translator and he doesn't want anybody to know that so he can keep his job, and because he's just lying through his teeth to protect himself and his family, this dude gets arrested by the US army and interrogated about his time in the Talaban. Which is not a thing that happened. Straight up. Crane just lied and got a dude arrested. This dude, btw, has no idea why people think he's in the Talaban, and after he gets arrested his wife shows up at Waheed's house looking for Parveen to see how she can deliver that asswhooping. I like her. This strikes me as correct behavior. I previously stated that Crane needs a good asswhooping.

That's not the only lie he tells, but I do think it's the only one that gets somebody arrested. But having that book read to them, the whole villiage is getting more and more pissed that some rando is out here telling lies on everybody.

So as the villiagers tried to tell the army, the other, surrounding redneck Afghans get jealous of the road and get shooty about it. Somebody sets up a bomb on the construction and that's just an overall shitty experience. It's starting major conflict and crime rates are going up, and the area is getting less and less safe. But the Americans don't know why the hell that happened because the translator lied, so they think it's the Talaban or some other group of religious extremests. Turns out that doing your job is important. So now the Americans think that they're in a war zone instead of a redneck feud, and start getting jumpy and trigger happy.

They had previously taken a video of the doctor at the clinic talking about how important rural medicine was, and how she needed more resources, like a staff for the hospital, and consistant electricity so that she could refrigerate vaccines and start vaccinating people, and so that there could be an on-call OBGYN, because most of her work was OBGYN stuff, especially pregnancy related and devlivery, and how having that road would help her out because that would make it a lot easier to get those things.

She's taking the road to work one day and the US soldiers, now scared of anybody brown in a car, shoot her and her son (who drives her because part of Afghan sexism is that women can't get driver's licenses) dead. So now she's dead and the villiage and that fancy hospital don't have a doctor at all, but they're probably still using her video for propoganda, so like 90% of characters in this book are pure dicks.

So the little 16-year-old wife gets pregnant, and she's having a lot of pregnancy complications, and there's no doctor, so that's shitty. A lot of things that happen in this book are just kinda shitty, but a very relatable kind of shitty if you come from poor folks and impoverished regions and you're not used to things like accessable healthcare. Half the things that are super shocking to Parveen, that she acts like should never happen in the world, are things that I react to with just a, "Yeah, that's shitty."

Then Parveen finally does something helpful, which is that one of the women who was being monitored by the doctor who is now dead, goes into premature labor, and Parveen actually listened when the doctor tried to teach her basic healthcare and knows how to apply pressure to stop the hemmoraging. And she does it. Sucessfully. She saves that woman's life. But this isn't based on a true story, and I don't know that for me, that's enough to redeem her, as a character. Like, obviously, it's way better that she did that than that she didn't do that, but she's not a midwife. There was a midwife, but she wouldn't do anything because the dying woman didn't have the money to pay her, and in general she's kind of... I don't want to call her a bad person, but she sure as shit don't work for free, even when people are dying. She also wouldn't work with Crane, despite being a person who actually knew how to deliver babies in horrible conditions, because he was an asshole who said he didn't want her there, and I feel like in a medical emergency you don't let asshollery stand in your way. I never have. But she's full on about her, I guess, character flaws, so a random American with minimul training had to save this woman's life.

Long story short, the hospital, which has also inspired jealousy, and is what really started all the jealousy related bullshit, and now has no staff at all, as well as no supplies, get bombed. The army is super pissed about it. And Waheed's son starts fighting with the people who are blowing stuff up because now they're pissed at the Americans and their favoritism, and it has officially become a clusterfuck.

So Parveen, being an American, leaves on a helecopter with the American Army, in an air lift, and takes the second wife with her because of her pregnancy complications. But as she's sitting there on the helecopter, she says that she has no idea what she's gonna do with this chick, this random teen mom that she just airlifted out of the only life she knows, and then the book just ENDS.

This was... an experience. I know that the way I'm describing it makes it seem as if I didn't like it, but I honestly did, it was just a confusing mix of emotions. I liked the story, it was well written. I liked the character motivations, I liked how all the plot points built and came together. But goddamn there were a lot of straight-up assholes in this book, and I just didn't really know how to deal with that. I think the major problem is that I am so far removed from the main character that I really just couldn't connect with her, couldn't relate to her, and therefore couldn't build an immersive connection with her. And the reason is because I found her thought process, and then her actions based on that thought process to be completely buckwild.

I straight up don't know why this book happened. I don't know why she went to Afghanistan. Nobody wanted her to go. She had no way to actually help anybody. It reads a little bit like the author just wanted the book to happen, so instead of making a real character with relatable thoughts and behaviors, they just wrote a pure dumbass, because only a pure dumbass would perform the actions needed to place her in Afghanistan. And I just have difficulty believing that someone this stupid, rude, and mean would be able to be in the position that Parveen was in to have the means to travel, as a graduate student in journalism, with the backstory they gave her. Had some aspects of her character been altered, it would make sense, like maybe she was rich and thought that though she didn't have any skills to help, she had resources to help. Or maybe she had been in a field other than journalism that would make her being unable to spot an extremely obvious charlatin more believable, like maybe she actually was a medical doctor and then she gets there and sees how bad of shape the hospital is in with no staff and such and that's her culture shock. Just a few tweaks would have made a much more believable character. But as it stands, I can't stand the bitch. Which is a shame, because this was a beautifully written book about an asshole who makes everything she touches worse.

Now, maybe part of the reason that I dislike that character so much is because I'm in a position where I am especially hateful towards this type of dumbassery or assholery, because I am vulnerable to the trouble they cause, like the charaters that Parveen interacts with. Maybe it's because I sincerely don't understand why anyone would like Crane given his background, and that's not generalizable, because there are people who can easily disconnect people's work from them as a person. But if I don't trust someone, I don't trust them. And Crane doesn't do one thing in the book that ever makes him look trustworthy, that ever makes Parveen's obsession with him make sense. He is introduced via his alderterous embezzlement scheme. Other people in Parveen's life, like her teacher, say not to trust him. I don't understand her motivation for believing a word he says. I understand the soldier's motivation for believing the book, because they knew a guy who was there, asked him if it was true (because they weren't going to take Crane's word for it) and he said "yes". He corroberated the story, and they had no reason to distrust him, because they thought he was a respectable person. They got had. Parveen is just an idiot.

And even if she did believe him, that still doesn't mean that SHE should go to an Afghan backwoods holler. What the hell was she going to do? He was a lying fuckwad, but at least he actually was a DOCTOR. Doctors can still doctor. All Parveen could do was write to tell people stuff, she couldn't actually do anything for those villiagers. So I don't understand what she was even doing there. And her dad was all, "Don't go to Afghanistan, it's a war zone, that's why I left." And then she goes there, and sure enough, it becomes a war zone, and she leaves.

I just, think it's a bad character, and I'm mad about it because the rest of the book is so good. The writing is rock solid, the plot is rock solid, the setting is so accurate you feel like you're there (though this may have been helped by my connection to a similar place in the states, in terms of just setting, because it's a little villiage in a holler). The only real issue that I have with it is that some of the characters are so unlikable. But others have clear motivations and their behaviors make perfect sense. Overall, I still reccomend it.

I will say that I don't know how accurate any of this is. Like if you're from Afghaistan, I don't know how close to actual Afghan culture or geography or anything this book actually is. It's certainly fiction, and as I stated repeatedly, it does make the Americans look like assholes, so it's possible that it makes y'all look bad, or at least different from how you actually are, as well. I wasn't exactly reading it for realism. I don't know anything about the author, and when googling her, I know that she's an American, but I don't know her ethnicity or heritage or if she's ever been to Afghanistan or anything. At the time of this writing she's only written two books. And I know that I've spoken a lot about how I disliked the characters in this book, but I did like the book overall, and might check out her other novel, The Submission.