The Kites Are Flying!

Michael Morpurgo's The Kites Are Flying is a short, quiet story for 10 year olds about a boy who has stopped speaking and the stranger who films him.

What happens

Max is a television reporter. He's in the West Bank making a film about the wall, and he means to tell it from both sides without pointing a finger at anybody.

On his first afternoon he walks up a hillside and finds a shepherd boy under an old olive tree, making a kite.

The boy doesn't speak. He's fascinated by Max's camera, and delighted by his hat.

You get the story twice over. Max writes it in his diary at night, in a tired, funny, homesick voice. And Said tells it too, in the dark, to his older brother Mahmoud.

Mahmoud is dead. Said talks to him every night anyway.

Those two voices doing the same day from opposite ends are what make the book. Max sees a picturesque boy and a good shot. Said sees a clumsy man with the best biscuits in the world.

Said makes a kite about once a week. When the east wind is right he flies it, and then he simply lets go of the string and gives it away over the wall to the settlement on the other side.

He writes Salaam on every one, and both brothers' names. A girl in a blue headscarf picks them up and waves back. She has ninety-four of them.

His uncle thinks the whole thing is a foolish dream and says so. He also says let the boy dream, which is roughly where the book sits.

You should know the whole story before you hand this over. Mahmoud was killed by soldiers two years earlier. Said was there, and near the end of this excerpt he relives it in his nightmare, his brother running at a tank, throwing stones, still running when they fire. There's blood on the page and a soldier crying and an apology about warning shots.

The book also says, in passing, that a settler woman was killed in an ambush that same morning and her daughter badly injured.

It's Morpurgo, so none of it is gratuitous and the sentences are simple. But it is a child's death told by his little brother who blames himself, and it will be the first many readers hear of any of this.

Read it with them if you can, or at least be around afterwards. There are questions in it that a 10 year old may well want to ask.

What to read next

For another child living inside a war, Morpurgo's Shadow is in the library. Aman grew up in Afghanistan, is now in a detention centre in England, and his best friend Matt is trying to get somebody to listen.