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The trouble with having Khaled Hosseini as your name and writing as your profession is that no matter how hard you try, your works will always be compared to your piece de resistance, The Kite Runner. While the debut novel of Hosseini let the literary circuits on fire and was quickly adapted to a namesake film too, the new work by him fails to create the magic again. I have gone through the work twice in a soan of eight days, the second time in a bid to search for the all important connection that I so lovingly made with the characters in The Kite Runner, but alas, there was none to be. Hosseini keeps the base intact as his earlier two novels- War torn Afghanistan, the protagonist(s)' lives changing on account of the tumult etc. where the novel fails, and a momentous failure it is, is that the author fails to keep the emotional crescendo sustained. The novel works brilliantly towards the middle, where the reader misses a heartbeat or two on Pari discovering her brother, again. But the crescendo quickly turns flat, a cola without fizz, a plateau and never works up again. As I write this, I also realise that in the true sense, there are no protagonists or antagonists - there are too many characters. Just too many. Unlike The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, which had focus on characters and developed them in flesh and bone, the current work burdens itself with creation of unnecessary characters, reeling across three generations. A lot of irrelevant time is spent on characters like Markos, Thalia etc. and at the risk of sounding brusque, I dare say that this seems like an attempt to add volume to the work, sans real content. The real heroes are muddled in page after page of unnecessary description of decrepit characters, and it shows. Hosseini tries and stays true to his roots, beautiful wordplay, stirring emotions, but these are too far spaced out and too many. In the end, And The Mountains Echoed buried itself under its own burden, and leaves the reader with a tingling sensation of having reached the epitome of emotional upheaval, but not quite. I write this review with mixed feelings of disappointment and ennui which I so clearly never thought will be the adjectives associated with a work of a reputed author like Hosseini.