Similarities Between Like Water For Chocolate And A Thousand Splendid Suns

Within the novels, Like Water For Chocolate by Laura Esquivel and A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini the two protagonists face many challenging hardships. In the novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns the main character, Miriam who grew up in a broken and loveless home faces the harrowing experience of losing a mother to suicide at the young age of 15. Soon after, she has married off to Rasheed a widowed shoemaker and a rather conservative man who makes it quite clear on the specific roles a wife has, including being obedient and bearing children. When Miriam is unable to have children after countless miscarriages Rasheed’s true colors are shown.

In Laura Esquivel’s novel, Like Water For Chocolate also faces challenges with her mother and

The two women both lacked supportive parental figures which caused them to have a difficult time accepting the “right” kind of love later on in life. Tita and Miriam experienced loveless relationships with their parents. Miriam’s mother wanted nothing to do with her and while Miriam used to look forward to her father Jalil’s rare visits he, unfortunately, didn’t reciprocate those feelings. Jalil's feeling towards his daughter is made quite apparent in chapter 7 after he refuses to break off Miriam’s marriage to Rasheed, leaving her to feel betrayed by one of the only people she had a connection with. Tita’s relationship with Mama Elena was as similar to Miriam and her parent's relationship as it was different. First of all their parents were never involved with the girls at all, Tita was almost solely brought up by Nacha and Miriam’s father always being too busy with work or his other wives to care too much for this daughter. Furthermore, both Jalil and Mama Elena caused their daughter's immense amounts of pain and many of their hardships in their respective novels. Weather Mama Elena was forbidding Tita marriage or Jalil was refusing to stop Miriam’s both sets of parents became the roots for their children's challenges in love. Furthermore, neither parent took blame for their injustices and failed to see that what they had done was wrong. The differences between the two are how the two girls