Welcome to Through the Eyes of a Child

This is Leslie VonHolten from HPPR’s Radio Readers on-air book club. This fall we invite you to read along with us as we explore books narrated Through the Eyes of a Child.

First, we’ll fall down the rabbit hole with Alice in her classic Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. We’ll continue our journey with Daniel Nayeri’s Everything Sad is Untrue, as we go from the Middle East to our very own Oklahoma, right here on the high plains. Next, storytelling and myth—those building blocks of childhood awareness—will be the center of The Blue Book of Nebo by Manon Steffan Ros. And we’ll end the season with Long Way Down by one of today’s most interesting writers, Jason Reynolds.

Why read books told to us through a child’s experience? For me, it’s simple: children know more than us grownups.

For example: Have you ever tried to explain slavery to a young child who is hearing about it for the first time? You remember that puzzled and horrified look on their faces, I’m sure. No argument about economic drivers or states’ rights is going to lessen the hard truth that child sees clearly, and inherently: that racism is abhorrent and stupid. That’s the inherent knowing that I mean when I say that children know more than us. It’s clear as day.

Sure, they lack the data and information that we grownups are burdened with—the political machinations of everyday life, the historical weight of events and past decisions, the stories upon stories we have been told, stories that have then shaped us. But they have the gift of assessing each situation for what it is, each person for how they present themselves. And this can be a wise approach to the world around us.

But it is more than innocence. In my own children, I witnessed the world that was no longer accessible to me: small brains sparking with imagination and wonder, minds that would wake up to a new world each day, a world that asked for interpretation. A world that needed stories that had not yet been told, but instead needed new stories to be built. Children create their own stories and myths, and these can be just as true and clear-eyed as anything we adults can share with them.

They also see, these kids. They see adults performing roles as we navigate the world—and social circles—around us, and they so often interpret these nuances with an emotional intelligence that many of us lose as we age. As we learn the performance of family, friends, work environments, church, community. What makes sense to us now seems strange to children, and for good reason. It is strange.

Sure, the books we are reading this fall were all written by adults. In that there is some magic, too: the ways that creativity can revisit our own days of wonder and mystery, can tap into it like a cold underground spring and immediately take us back to a life we once knew. A life of when we were children, and we took in the world with certain and clear, good faith.

We look forward to sharing Through the Eyes of a Child with you this fall. Find the reading list and join us at HPPR.org, or Like us on Facebook.