the kite runner

I'm about a decade late on reading this book.  Goodness, I loved it.  Once I got past the first few chapters - the times I sat down to read the book - I couldn't put it down.  I cried in about three or four different parts of the book.  It was gripping, heartbreaking/tragic, vivid, uncomfortable - even beautiful.  There are very few things that I love more than a great book.

There are two specific parts in the book that I felt specifically drawn to.  1. When Amir's father Baba dies and 2. the ending - when Amir and Sohrab were running a kite together.  The passages below specifically:

"Listening to them, I realize how much of who I was, what I was, had been defined by Baba and the marks he had left on people's lives.  My whole life, I had been "Baba's son."  Now he was gone.  Baba couldn't show me the way anymore; I'd have to find it on my own.  The thought of it terrified me." 

"It was only a smile, nothing more.  It didn't make everything all right.  It didn't make anything all right.  Only a smile.  A tiny thing.  A leaf in the woods, shaking in the wake of a startled bird's flight.  But I'll take it.  With open arms.  Because when spring comes, it melts the snow one flake at a time, and maybe I just witnessed the first flake melting.  I ran.....I ran"

I'm officially on the bandwagon :)

I might add that kites were one of Leo's favorite things to play with on a windy day...I have many memories of flying kites with him on the shores of a few Great Lakes.  

xox,
Kathryn