Meggie Cleary in Colleen McCullough's The Thorn Birds is a strong woman who tends to be most unlucky in love, yet she keeps on with her life and throws herself in to Drogheda. Let's look at how Meggie is similar to and different from the female characters in The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini.

We might contrast Meggie to Soraya in The Kite Runner, for Soraya is happy in her marriage to Amir although Soraya is also a strong woman like Meggie in some ways. They both rebel against the standard treatment of women in their cultures. We might compare Meggie, at least to a point, with Sanaubar, who behaves in an immoral way as a young person as Meggie does in her affair with Ralph. The situations are not exactly alike, of course, but both women make wrong choices that they must live with.

As for A Thousand Splendid Suns, we might compare Meggie with Laila in some ways; they are both caught in a loveless marriage and both in love with another man. We might contrast Meggie with Mariam in some ways (although Mariam, too, is stuck in a loveless marriage) because of Mariam's eventual violence toward Rasheed (although this was in defense of Laila) after years of abuse at his hands. Meggie, on the other hand, left Luke.