'The Kite Runner' author hits back after book banned in MN high school

Gov. Tim Walz and his DFL colleagues in the state Legislature have touted a law passed in 2024 that “banned book bans.”

But school districts in Minnesota are still limiting students’ access to books.

In St. Francis, district leaders are relying on an anonymous Florida-based website — with links to the right-wing group Moms for Liberty — to decide which books are appropriate for students, wrote Ryan Fiereck, president of the labor union of St. Francis educators, in a Reformercommentary this week.

The website, booklooks.org, often considers books featuring LGBTQ and Black characters, and those with “controversial religious commentary,” to be inappropriate for students, Fiereck wrote. Any book with a rating higher than ‘3’ on the website is subject to removal from St. Francis shelves if a parent, student or community member complains.

“The Kite Runner” by Khaled Hosseini is among the books banned in St. Francis. The 2003 novel follows Amir, a wealthy Pashtun boy, and his servant/friend Hassan, a member of the ostracized Hazara ethnic minority. When Hassan is attacked and sexually assaulted by neighborhood boys after winning a prized kite for Amir, Amir fails to intervene. Amir later moves to the U.S. with his father to escape the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, but returns to his home country as an adult to rescue Hassan’s son from an orphanage.

The novel addresses racial caste systems, sexual assault, theocracy and U.S. foreign policy — themes that have made the book controversial since its release, both in the U.S. and in Afghanistan.

After a community member complained about the book, it was pulled from St. Francis shelves.

Hosseini was born in Kabul in 1965. His father was a diplomat, and his mother a high school English teacher. The family moved to Paris for his father’s job in 1976, and in 1980, after a communist coup and Soviet invasion, the family was granted political asylum in the U.S. Hosseini became a medical doctor in California and wrote “The Kite Runner” — his debut novel — while practicing medicine.

His books, “The Kite Runner,” “A Thousand Splendid Suns,” and “And the Mountains Echoed,” have been published in over 70 countries and sold more than 40 million copies worldwide.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

As a journalist, I should admit that I have a bias here. I read “The Kite Runner” for the first time in middle school — I’m pretty sure I got it off a shelf in my 8th grade English teacher’s classroom — and I loved it. After that, I read your other books, and they’ve all stuck with me. So thank you for that.

[Laughs] That makes me feel old, but thank you very much.

The reasoning for the “Kite Runner” ban in St. Francis has to do with its depiction of sexual violence, particularly the scene where Hassan is assaulted by other boys in an alley. When you were writing the novel, why was it important to include not just physical violence, but sexual violence, as a turning point and recurring theme?

I knew that that pivotal scene in the alley was central to the book, and it’s an act of sexual violence because it’s ultimately an act of imposing your will on another person. And there’s a very clear hierarchy between the people in that alley: the victim is a member of an oppressed minority, and the perpetrator belongs to the majority ethnicity in Afghanistan and belongs to a different socioeconomic background. So there’s a big difference in hierarchy.

When I went to Afghanistan, so many people told me that they felt that Afghanistan did the bidding of the West in the 80s by fighting the Soviet Union, which Ronald Reagan called the “new empire.” And once the purposes of the West were served — meaning once Hassan had won the kite for Amir — the country was then brutalized. Many Afghans used the word “rape” for a long time, while the West sort of looked around the corner into the alley and did nothing. I heard from Afghan people themselves, how they thought about their relationship with the West and how they felt abandoned. They served their purpose, and when the time came, they were abandoned and left to be brutalized.

So it couldn’t just be a beating up. That scene had to be so brutal and so awful that it transformed these characters and haunted them into adulthood.

When this book was first published, did you think it would cause such an uproar 20, 25 years later?

I thought the uproar would be caused within my own community of Afghan readers, because the book touches on taboo subjects. You know, the whole idea of ethnic strife in Afghanistan is a taboo subject. It’s something people don’t speak about openly. It’s sort of like an open secret.

So I thought that my rather naked depiction of ethnic tension in Afghanistan would jar Afghan readers. And it certainly did. I did not expect if I would be banned from, you know, high schools in Florida and Minnesota. That did come as a surprise.

If you were speaking to a parent or a school board member who feels like “The Kite Runner” isn’t appropriate for middle or high school students, what would you say to them?

I would tell them that I’ve been hearing from high school students for the better part of 20 years, both in-person in high schools, where I have met them across the country, and also in letters that they have sent me themselves in their own words. I would tell the school board that there’s an enormous disconnect between the objections raised by the so-called “concerned parents” and the experiences of the students who are actually reading the book — because the students tell me what reading “The Kite Runner” meant for them, and, quite poignantly, tell me what impact it made on them. How the book encouraged them to stand up to bullies and defy intolerance; how the book’s tagline, which is, “there’s a way to be good again,” inspired some of them to volunteer, to look inward, to try to be better people, amend broken ties with people they had hurt; how “The Kite Runner” gave them a more nuanced and maybe a more human and compassionate perspective on Afghanistan and its people and everything that they had to endure.

I would tell the board that when these letters close, the students express gratitude to the book for these new insights. I would tell the board that the notion that somehow this book is harmful to students — when the response from teachers and students themselves is so overwhelmingly positive and enthusiastic — is quite a bewildering notion.

Are there any particular interactions with students who have read “The Kite Runner” that have stuck with you?

There are many. Students have walked up to me at talks and told me that they were sexually abused and that reading the book was difficult, but it helped them heal in some way. They tell me that they were afraid of their parents, or they had a strained relationship with their father, or with their mother, and that Amir’s struggles with his father helped them evaluate their own relationships.

They tell me that they knew nothing about Muslims, that they knew nothing about Afghanistan, and that the book helped them understand a part of the world in a better way. Every person reads a book differently, and it’s remarkable how many students have told me that in very specific, personal ways in which the book has affected them. But the ones that really stay with me are the ones from the kids who told me that they were bullied, and they see in the characters Hassan and Amir a sort of reflection of themselves.

Have you ever had someone come up to you and say they regret reading it?

That has never happened.

I guess that would be a weird thing to say to an author. [Laughs]

It would be. I have had people say, ”I wish I hadn’t read this book because I cried for six hours and it ruined my whole Saturday.” [Laughs.] No, in all seriousness, that’s never happened.

On BookLooks, the website used by St. Francis to determine which books are subject to a ban, the reason for the high rating of “The Kite Runner” is it’s depiction of sexual violence. But how much of the “Kite Runner” bans generally do you think are really about the sexual violence? Do you think there’s something bigger going on with why this book is being banned so frequently?

What they say is that this is about protecting children, which I find is dishonest, because I think the book ban movement — and let’s face it, the St. Francis situation with this website, they say it’s not a book ban, but it really is — it really has little to do with protecting children. It has everything to do with targeting books with diverse viewpoints that may not be in line with the reviewers’ political or religious beliefs

And it has to do with a gradual and deliberate merging of educational policy and partisan politics. So this website, Booklooks in St. Francis, does not rely on the expertise of librarians and instructors, but it relies on the subjective opinion of so-called “concerned parents” who comb the books for material that they personally find objectionable based on some kind of narrow ideological litmus test, which often leans heavily on the conservative side. So I think to say this is to protect children is a guise for instead, advanced and narrow political ideology.

Last one. What’s one good book you’ve read lately?

Can I give you a couple?

Sure, I’ll take a couple.

I’m in the process of reading a book that was gifted to me called “Far From the Tree” by Andrew Solomon.

I had never read “In Cold Blood” by Truman Capote…I was just blown away. It’s an amazing piece of writing. And I also read ”Slouching Towards Bethlehem” by Joan Didion recently, a series of wonderful essays about life in California and all the things she’s interested in.