Due to my love of reading I thought I would set up a blog to share with people my thoughts on the books i've read. I cannot reconcile my personal reactions to the dreadful horrors of being a female in Afghanistan and the author's 'Pollyanna' view of ordinary Afghan life (despite an on-going war, episodic as it appears to be). It also offered an insight of what it was like for those who left Afghanistan and had to adjust to life in new countries. We at Penguin Random House Australia acknowledge that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are the Traditional Custodians and the first storytellers of the lands on which we live and work. Meanwhile, Sunny can't decide which of two men, one a journalist and the other a black-ops guy, she wants to date.

I found myself completey immersed in another world and felt as though I came to know the characters of this story intimately. Even though I'm a sucker for romantic endings and cutesy plot twists, I found the general tone a little too saccharine and cloying at times. There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data. Our group thought these might be shining a light on some of the conditions faced by women in Afghanistan; exploring cultural differences; highlighting the importance of kindness and showing the power of love. Deborah Rodriguez, wrote this book based on her own experiences of being in Kabul, she spent five years there, she taught at and became director of Kabul Beauty School and owned Cabul Coffee House and her knowledge, really brings this book to life.It is a very easy read and the author, Deborah Rodriguez, has lived and run a cafe in Kabul herself so you can have some confidence that she probably knows what she is writing about. Having read a number of fiction books about Afghanistan (A Thousand Splendid Suns being my favourite) I was keen to read this book following five women in Kabul. But Rodriguez sets the scene for the reader, detailing their culture and social expectations and evocatively illustrating a city where life is lived on a knife-edge. It was a case of the ending being anticlimactic after the main body of the book being reasonably good reading - it could easily have earned another star had it had an ending with more impact. It's infuriating to find complex issues treated with the simplistic framework of tradition verses modernity.

As the plot evolves, Rodriguez has some of her female Western characters, Sunny's friends, visit Afghan women who are in prison with their babies incarcerated alongside them. Ahmet sees her accept a letter, and feels that Rashif has dishonoured his mother, and so his family, as unmarried men and women should never interact without male relative chaperones.

And lastly, the way they managed to find Yasmina’s sister towards the end of the book, without any lasting consequences or repercussions for stealing her away from people who wanted to sell her into prostitution wasn’t very credible either.

Turns out it was Middle-Class Southern accent, the accent all British characters have in American film and TV. Afghanistan has long been a place where wars are waged, power fought over, while its people are left uneducated, illiterate, and impoverished. If you have made it all the way through question six and you are still nodding your head, then A Cup of Friendship is the book for you. Deborah also owned the Oasis Salon and the Cabul Coffee House, and is the founder of the nonprofit organization Oasis Rescue, which aims to teach women in post-conflict and disaster-stricken areas the art of hairdressing.

I just didn't believe the writing of this author, she lost me when she didn't take the time to understand the Afghans she was trying to portray.

It’s a good few years ago since I read the other books by the author in this trilogy but the author does a good job in writing the story in a way that certain parts triggered my memory and there is also enough information given so you don’t feel you are missing any background on the characters, making it easy to read as a standalone. It is funny yet also a serious and thought provoking depiction of how life is in Kabul, and how Afghans view western “help”.There were plot points I wanted to read more about that kind of disappeared or brought to an end with a single sentence.