I didn’t open it for three months. But I didn’t put it away, either, because I wanted to be able to find it when I was ready. I kept seeing it lying there, catching my eye, tempting me to pick it up. After all, I had bought it the moment it was available. What was I waiting for? I guess I was putting off the possibility that it wouldn’t live up to my expectations; I was afraid I would be disappointed. It had happened before.

When Julia Glass came out with her second novel, The Whole World Over, I could hardly wait to read it. I had loved Three Junes. The characters were very real, each dealing with a different kind of love relationship, their passions tested by complexities and secrecy. It seemed there were three discrete stories, three different Junes, and yet in the end they became intertwined, each story enriched by its connection with the others. Especially compelling was the middle story, told from the first person point of view of a young gay man struggling with love and betrayal and the physical consequences of his choices. But I was disappointed in The Whole World Over. Glass used the same technique of separate stories whose characters are on the periphery of each other’s lives. But I didn’t find the character of the “middle” section completely believable, or appealing enough to really care about, in the difficult choices she had to make. I liked the “fringe” characters much better and would have liked to spend more time with them. In the end, things do not come together smoothly, and I was left with the feeling that there were a lot of loose threads. One guaranteed side effect of the book is that if you have large trees, you will look up into their tops and if you see any weakened branches, you will get them pruned.

At the core of Ann Packer’s first novel, The Dive from Clausen’s Pier, is a gripping moral question: should one sacrifice personal happiness to a sense of duty to another human being? Compounding the difficulty of the decision is the fact that the protagonist is a young woman of 23, and the choice she makes will determine the course of her life. I read the book quite awhile ago, and I forget exactly how everything turns out, but what I don’t forget is feeling the agony of the young woman’s situation. In Songs Without Words Packer tries to reprise this kind of ethical bind: how to love and care for another and be true to self. This time the main characters are two women in middle age who have been friends since childhood. A crisis with the teenage daughter of one of the women throws the friendship out of its usual balance and forces choices. I found neither the situation nor the characters as compelling in this novel as they were in Packer’s first.

Last week I decided it was time to find out whether or not I was in for a third strike. And so, finally, I opened the pages of A Thousand Splendid Suns. I had expected, and found, a re-submersion into a culture so vastly different from my own as to be absolutely riveting. The story of Afghanistan over the past 40 years shows a country in constant political flux and recurring warfare, a country of rigid class structure, of inhumane subjugation of women, and of astounding vio­lence. I had steeled myself for graphic descriptions of brutality dealt by a more powerful human being upon a weaker one, but still I was unprepared for the blows. I had hoped for characters who are at the same time immensely vulnerable and courageous beyond imagining; I was not disappointed with the two women at the heart of the story. And the ignorant, selfish brutality of the husband equals that of the earlier antagonist. But what Hosseini’s first novel, The Kite Runner, so indelibly carved in my memory was the anguish of a young boy faced with a moral choice impossible to resolve. The story that follows is of how he lives with the consequences of his action into adulthood and tries to atone for it. I didn’t find such a heart-wrenching focus in this second book. Certainly, the young girl Mariam makes a choice early on that will plague her afterward, but because she was not really aware of the probable consequence of her action, she does not seem as tragic as Amir, who acted with full knowledge. The two women are totally victims, rather than also agents, of their unremitting hardships and sufferings.

It’s hard to say how these second novels compare to the first ones by objective standards; perhaps it was only unrealistic expectations that made them fall short in my eyes. I loved the debut novels. But I didn’t find the authors lovelier the second time around.