By: Avery Jones
I guess now that it is a required novel at Eaton High School, I can’t exactly recommend everyone reads it because you’re all going to, but I sure can talk it up as much as possible! So here it goes: my advocation for my very favorite novel of all time. The king of all redemption novels. The god of guilt novels. The ultimate brother’s keeper novel. The one. The only. The Kite Runner.
The Kite Runner changed my life. It was the very first novel of literary merit I ever read. It was the summer after 7th grade; I was 12 years old. I was sitting in our car outside of the records office in Meeker waiting for my mom, and I’d been waiting for over an hour. I was about to go insane from boredom. I was searching for something–anything–to do when I found my mother’s copy of the book her AP Literature class was reading over the summer, The Kite Runner. I picked it up, cracked it open, and next thing I knew, an hour and 100 pages later, my mom was scrambling into the car apologizing for how long she was gone. She broke off mid-sentence when she saw me reading her book, and she said, “Avery, you may not read that! You’re not old enough!” But it was too late. I was already hooked.
She forbade me from reading The Kite Runner, but I couldn’t stop. So I would sneak into her room after she was asleep, steal her book, run back into my room, and dive under the covers so I could read her book without being discovered.
But she found out soon enough what I had been doing when she came home one Saturday afternoon to find me weeping on the couch over her copy of The Kite Runner flipped open to the last page. She couldn’t be mad at me because, well, what mother gets mad at her child for reading? We sat and discussed the novel for the next few hours, and that is when I fell in love with literature. I learned to find meaning within the writing instead of just reading for enjoyment. That was the moment I knew The Kite Runner had changed my life.
From the moment I cracked open that book in the escalade outside the records office in Meeker, I knew that it would be an amazing novel. But I didn’t know just what an impact it would have on my life. That book gave me a taste of real writing of literary. It began my love of literature. It opened my world to symbolism and imagery and the power of words. It taught me more about sacrifice and love than anything else has in the world. That book taught me how much power a novel can wield. And for that, I will forever love The Kite Runner.
