Perhaps more than any other contemporary author, Emma Donoghue has explored this particular knowingness of children, most famously in her Man Booker Prize-shortlisted 2010 best seller, “ Room,” which is narrated by a 5-year-old boy locked in a backyard shed with his mother, who was abducted two years before his birth. Only later, in retrospect, as James writes, will Maisie be able to fully attach meaning to the perfectly preserved “images and echoes kept for her in the childish dusk, the dim closet, the high drawers, like games she wasn’t yet big enough to play.”īut even before they’re able to ascribe words and consequence to those images and echoes, children intuit far more than we think they do. Perspectives of preadolescence - before the skeptical, angsty, socially corruptible teenage years set in - are fairly rare in adult literary fiction, which is maybe why they tend to be so indelible: Think of Scout Finch’s observations of racial prejudice in the Deep South in Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” or of bright, 6-year-old Maisie Farange haplessly navigating her narcissistic parents’ acrimonious divorce in Henry James’s “What Maisie Knew.” The reader understands the implications that the child doesn’t, and the ironic tension of this gap has a heightening effect on grown-up folly. Children watch and listen without prejudice, their unsynthesized, unblinkered, sometimes brutally lucid perceptions the closest thing we have to an unmediated human filter on the world.

In literature, as in life, kids have a way of ratcheting up the stakes.

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