The Morning the Sky Held Its Breath

For a long time before I had a story, I had a sound: the little rattle a kite makes just before it climbs. If you have ever flown one, you know it. The cloth shivers, the line tightens in your hand, and for half a second you are not sure whether it will fall or go. Then it goes. I wanted to write about a girl who knew that sound so well she could no longer bear to hear it.

Her name is Sivi Varo, and she lives on Luri, one of a scatter of islands floating in an open turquoise sky. They are not enchanted castles. They have gardens and market stalls, school steps and repair sheds, and people who argue about supper. Rope bridges join them, sailboats cross between them, and the wind is what lets neighbours visit one another. Sivi's father keeps the bridges safe and checks every knot twice. Sivi used to send kites farther than anyone could see. Now she keeps one folded under her bed: her mother's, bright red, with one seam never finished.

Then, one morning, the wind stops.

A Kite for the Quiet Between Storms begins on that morning, with every kite above Luri hanging perfectly still and a small boy called Pek convinced he has done it himself. I loved writing that moment. Something enormous and frightening is happening, and the first person to notice is a child who suspects he may be rather better at kites than he thought. The bridges slacken. A nearby island begins, very slowly, to drift out of reach. The grownups gather to talk about storms and waiting. And the folded kite, when Sivi opens it across her bedroom floor, starts to point.

Quiet let you hear the ropes tapping the bridge rails and someone calling you home. Silence swallowed both.

That line came early, and the whole book grew around it. I think most of us, children especially, know the difference it describes. Quiet is a room you can rest in. Silence is a room where something is missing. Sivi has been living beside a kind of silence for a year, and she has become very good at not looking at it. When the sky itself goes silent, she has to take out the thing she has kept folded away and listen to it.

She does not go alone, and I am glad of that, because her companions were the part of this book I most enjoyed writing. Odan is a friend who can mend any pulley while explaining why the pulley ought to apologise, and who makes a joke whenever he is frightened, which is often. Tuma is an older pilot who leaves blank spaces on her maps until she has seen a place with her own eyes, a habit I admire more the longer I think about it. Together they follow a trail of bells that have forgotten how to ring, towards the island where the weather is kept.

I will tell you only what the back of the book does about what they find there: it is not a monster. Someone has been saving wind to protect one place, while the rest of the sky slowly loses its way. I wanted a story whose trouble a young reader would recognise from ordinary life. Holding on to something precious is not wicked. Most of us do it because we are afraid. The question the book asks is what that holding costs everyone else, and what it might take to share.

There is a quieter thread too, which adults reading aloud may feel before younger listeners do. Sivi and her father love each other and keep misunderstanding each other. He has an answer to everything she asks before she has finished asking, and she has begun to mistake his worry for a lack of faith in her. Neither of them is entirely wrong. Watching them find their way across that gap mattered to me as much as any bridge in the sky.

The pictures are washed in lagoon turquoise, leaf green, warm cream and storm violet, and through all of them runs one thread of red: Sivi's kite, from the first page to the last. I hope that makes it a good book to share at bedtime, a chapter a night, with time to stop and look.

If you know a reader who loves a brave journey, a friend who jokes at the wrong moment and a sky big enough to get lost in, or a reader who is carrying something folded away of their own, I would love them to meet Sivi. Open A Kite for the Quiet Between Storms on the morning the wind goes missing, and follow the red kite east.