Clunky sentences

I'm currently reading A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini. It took me a while to begin to appreciate it, but the other night it kicked in and I read a hundred pages when I should have been sleeping. That night I came across this sentence and I found it just dreadful. Here is most of the paragraph; the last sentence is the clunker:

Mariam swooned. Her eyes watered. Her heart took flight. And she marveled at how, after all these years of rattling loose, she had found in this little creature the first true connection in her life of false, failed connections.

False, failed connections? I read that sentence and it was like hitting a rutted dirt road in the middle of a smooth ride. Does anyone else find it clunky? How did it make it all the way to publication?