David felt that in some way a person's room should hold a trace of them something should linger. The pipes and their rack were missing the room was quite unhaunted. I particularly liked the depiction of the friendship between the boy, the 40ish year-old central character and the 111 year-old man.Īnd of course, the sections about the kite were wonderful.Īlmost a week after the funeral, he visited Lon's room, quite bare of Lon – without even the apple box half filled with sawdust for spitting into. Mitchell's novels ('The Vanishing Point' and 'Who Has Seen the Wind' tie for that spot), it is still a great story of how to live fully. This past summer, I needed a new book to read on the ferry and grabbed this book from my sister's shelf.

It also introduces a whole new generation of readers to the rampaging Daddy Sherry, a holy terror whom Margaret Laurence considered to be Mitchell's 'best and most complete character.' This new edition of The Kite coincided with the publication of a newly discovered and never-before-published edition of the novel in audio format, featuring Mitchell's own reading. As David chases his recalcitrant subject all over town, he begins to understand the meaning of life and finds love and happiness for the first time. But he hasn't reckoned on the cantankerous cunning of Daddy Sherry. Still recovering from the disappointments of a fatherless childhood, the uptight David just wants to file his story as quickly as possible and hightail it back to Toronto. Set in the Prairie backwater of Shelby, Alberta, seasoned reporter and minor television celebrity David Lang arrives to write a magazine feature on the town's oldest living citizen, the 111-year-old curmudgeon Daddy Sherry. Mitchell's critically acclaimed novel, The Kite, is a humorous yet touching story of a journalist's worst nightmare.

The kite book