... [99 Nights in Logar is] crafted with care, respect and a hard-earned and profound understanding of its readership. It is funny, razor-sharp and full of juicy tales that feel urgent and illicit, turning the reader into a lucky, trilingual fly on the wall in a family loaded with secrets and prone to acquiring more ... The ensuing adventure is witty and engaging, somewhat allegorical, thrumming with the histories of foreign wars and with memories of lives lost and childhoods cut short ... While the novel is written in English, it deprioritizes the Western reader. This is its most interesting accomplishment ... Kochai has created an exciting and true voice.
This is...a funny, lightly surreal evocation of life in rural Afghanistan which partly aims, in entertaining American readers, to rouse their sympathy for the real-life Afghans who have been suffering under U.S. occupation for seventeen years now ... it’s driven by a profusion of tales within tales, which begin and break off, resume and recur, swerve or blossom into one another ... The magical elements don’t seem so much more far-fetched than the drones in the sky, and the book’s comic register turns out to be wildly elastic ... The comedy helps restore a sense of the weight and substance of individual Afghan lives for readers so inured to the large numbers of reported deaths over many years ... Toward the end, a crucial story that keeps surfacing in tantalizing fragments, about the death of Watak, Marwand’s uncle, is finally told in its entirety—in Pashto ... For these few pages, no concession at all is made to the English-speaking reader who up till now has been so lavishly entertained
[The book is] something more than well crafted; it’s phenomenal ... this is more than a coming-of-age novel ... Kochai’s book has a big heart ... When reading writers from places such as Afghanistan we burden them with the additional expectation of bringing us revelations that we are too lazy to find in our news feeds. And here Kochai rises to the task with a truth that three generations of thinktanks, after hundreds of billions in war effort and more billions in aid effort, haven’t been able to unearth.
... [a] sparkling debut ... 99 Nights in Logar is funny, immersive and crackling with a tween boy’s sensibilities ... Kochai’s writing throughout is lovely and evocative while still hewing to his young narrator’s perspective ... Kochai’s storytelling has the power to make 99 Nights in Logar readers feel.. absorbed and captivated.
... [a] charming and unpredictable debut ... The energy comes less from the thrill of the chase than from the frame it gives Kochai to showcase a narrative style fizzing with surprise. He swerves from slapstick silliness to magic realism and poignant reflection on family members lost to decades of violence.
The setting of Logar would be a rural idyll if it were not for the war. The black thread of violence runs through every tale and the individual who tells it. It is then that we begin to see the point of the stories which is not just to entertain. They are in fact a vehicle for education, both as an oral history of the family and the nation but also, mingled with religious teaching and fables, a primer for Afghan culture. And, perhaps more importantly, they become a way of absorbing the war more easily. By encasing horrific events in a blanket of 'story,' the awful realities of conflict become sanitized and distanced ... By threading contemporary life with legend, the reader is challenged with differentiating reality from fiction.
Kochai weaves together a tapestry of stories to present a captivating image of the country that has been called 'the graveyard of empires.' ... For the characters, these tales are not mere entertainments, but rather ways of understanding their often war-shattered world, the enactment of collective memory that creates a family, and a nation. For American readers, they are a way into a culture too often reduced to stereotypes ... Kochai maintains a playful humor in Marwand’s voice, channeling something like One Thousand and One Nights meets The Sandlot, and we feel as if we are watching the coming-of-age of a real boy. Yet, especially in its second half, the novel departs from realism into the hazy lyricism of mythmaking on the way to its affecting conclusion.
... lyrically powerful ... refuses to shy away from the images of a decrepit Afghanistan that the media, particularly Western media, so delights in pushing ... skillfully weaves folktales, Islamic hadiths, stories from the Quran, and simple retellings of past occurrences in a way that breathes life into the oral tradition of storytelling still so prevalent in countries such as Afghanistan, India, and Pakistan ... the Afghani equivalent of gathering around a warm campfire on a night where the air still has quite a bit of nip to it. You aren’t entirely comfortable, but you’re surrounded by loved ones as you share tales that evoke a spectrum of emotions ... As for the language barriers, they cause confusion without becoming obstacles ... Despite the linguistic barriers Western and even some Eastern audiences will experience, the novel unerringly guides readers to consider our many, unexpected similarities. At some point and in some place, we will all be outsiders.
99 Nights in Logar is a fine novel. It doesn't always flow smoothly, but Kochai (and his editors) have clearly put a lot of work into both the sentence-level craft and the larger structure of chapters and sections ... [There] are excellent moments when Kochai shines as a storyteller, but he also excels at voicing the Americanisms of an Afghan-American 12-year-old and how these come into conflict with his Afghan family who have stayed in Afghanistan. 99 Nights in Logar is, in a few words, finely crafted but not perfect; and this is a good thing ... Kochai's first novel is a good book, but it's not incredible; it's memorable, and represents a unique and important entry in the increasing literature of the Middle Eastern diaspora in the US, documenting how American-backed wars and conflict have spread into the days and nights of children the world over.
Kochai captures the joys and the sorrows of life in Afghanistan, offering readers a glimpse into everyday life in a country whose people have grown so used to constant bombardment that they can differentiate between various types of IEDs by sound alone.
An absorbing portrait of life in contemporary Afghanistan that is simultaneously raucous and heart-rending, told from a perspective we rarely hear: that of a young émigré returning home to his war-torn country ... an extravagant outpouring of storytelling ... reads like a thrilling collision of Huckleberry Finn, Boccacio's The Decameron, and One Thousand and One Nights. As it careens between tragic stories of Afghanistan's history of perpetual warfare and magical realist tales of djinn, the novel threatens to become unwieldy at times, but Marwand is the thread that holds it together ... beautiful prose that encompasses the brutality of life in Afghanistan without overshadowing the warmth of family, culture, and storytelling, Kochai delivers a gorgeous and kaleidoscopic portrait of a land we're used to seeing through a single, insufficient lens: the war on terror ... A vivid and moving novel about heritage, history, and the family bonds that transcend culture.
An imaginative, enthralling, and lyrical exploration of coming home—and coming-of-age—set amid the political tensions of modern Afghanistan ... slowly evolves into a mesmerizing collection of stories ... Kochai is a masterful storyteller, and will leave readers eager for the next tale.
