Reading the negative reviews made me wary of reading Khaled Hosseni’s The Kite Runner. It’s not the best start to your reading experience, being told you’re going to hate something, is it? But still I read it. The novel is set against the back drop of the final days of Afghanistan’s monarchy and the oppression of the Taliban. It tells the story of two boys, Amir and Hassan, and their friendship set against the social and political conflicts of the early 1970s. The two boys exist happily enough side by side, until the day of Kabul’s annual kite-fighting tournament, when a shocking event turns the characters’ lives upside down. The…