Thoughts on The Bookseller of Kabul (Thus Far)

I'm about a 100 pages into Bookseller, and my feelings on it are mixed to say the least. It's certainly not a bad book: the prose is concise and effective, and the subject matter is very important, yet nothing in the book is truly engaging me yet. It's all very episodic in nature, which can be successful when well implemented, but is keeping me distant here. Additionally, in thinking about the book I keep coming back to the aforementioned prose. A Thousand Splendid Suns, a book very similar in both content and tone, was shamelessly emotionally manipulative, to the extent that I kept waiting for Rasheed to start sporting a pencil thin mustache to compliment his almost cartoon-like level of villainy. In Bookseller, the sparse nature of the writing seems to make the book more objective, but in hindsight it manipulates the reader in a different way. The basic, punchy sentences employed by Seierstad seem to offer unwritten commentary in the absence of anything explicit. For instance, on page 36, when the murder of the daughter is detailed, the chapter concluded with the single line, "Then they returned to the mother." (This of course refers to the boys who committed the crime in question.) The creepy matter-of-fact nature of that last line may seem to just tell the facts, but the sparseness of it does such a good job of illustrating the horror and perversity of the situation that in retrospect it's pretty manipulative. So those are my feelings on Bookseller as of now. Nothing in the book has really grabbed me yet, and ever since I recognized the subtly manipulative tone of the writing it's frustrated me, but Bookseller is certainly respectable in that it's well executed for what it is.