Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close Although it’s a heartbreaking portrait of toxic motherhood and a child failed, Astrid’s lush prose and rich interior world reveal a young girl who seems destined, above all, to survive. As she moves through various homes and a woeful array of surrogate mothers, Ingrid continues to overshadow her life from afar. When Ingrid is imprisoned for the murder of Barry, an ex-boyfriend who dared to spurn her, Astrid is thrown into the chaos and uncertainty of the foster care system. But Ingrid is all too consumed with ideas of her own greatness to be concerned with the mundanity of her daughter’s childhood.
Twelve-year-old Astrid, the daughter of struggling poet, Ingrid Magnussen, is enchanted with her free-spirited mother and the stories she weaves about herself. Here are five of my favorite child narrators:
There’s a transcendent power in the imagination and its ability to function as a form of resistance, resilience, and survival. There is also something in the telling itself, in the transformation of experience into words, into story. Children’s minds work differently to those of adults it’s the way they make sense of the world, the way a child’s own small world is the whole world and at the same time, an ever-evolving concept, as they learn and grow and change by the day. Their imaginations are wild and wonderful, untethered to the constraints of reality or logic. Perhaps it’s because children are such natural storytellers and inventors of worlds. There’s a particular magic, I think, which children bring to a novel, a poignancy and a power. And it seemed from the start that the person to tell it was seven-year-old Dolly Rust. The story, which begins as an exciting father and daughter road trip and grows steadily more ominous, is a story of lost innocence and broken dreams, of a childhood abruptly ended. I didn’t set out to have a child narrator in my own novel, All the Lost Things, but it happened anyway, as if instinctively. I can clearly recall the tone of their voices, the inventiveness of their language, the way their stories are so frequently heartbreaking and hopeful at the same time. I can remember these children of fiction in ways I often can’t remember adults. I’m certain they do exist, somewhere out there, but the ones I’ve encountered over the years are up there with some of my favorite and most memorable reads. I’ve never met a child narrator I didn’t like.
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