UNRELIABLE NARRATOR

I'm reading Jimmy by Robert Whitlow. It's an interesting story about a mentally challenged boy and his loving parents. Whitlow's style makes you feel like you're in the room with the characters. They seem so real. This story is a departure from Whitlow's other novels, most of them in the legal suspense genre. This story's protagonist is, as I said, a child.

A child is called an unreliable narrator, meaning we're seeing the world (and the story) through the child's eyes, not an adult's, and a child can't always be relied on to report the facts. For instance, think about your backyard when you were growing up. If it had any room at all, it probably seemed gigantic to you. But when you grew up and looked at the same backyard, the proportion was correct. It wasn't gigantic; it was average. That happened to me. I thought our backyard was as big as a whole block. But it wasn't big at all. A child's perspective is off on many things.

Another thing you have to decide when writing about a child as your main character is to consider how he says things and how he thinks. He wouldn't think or act or talk like an adult. Listen to children talk. They don't use big words (for the most part). They don't use hard words. They simplify things.

However, then you read Leif Enger's widely-acclaimed and runaway bestseller Peace Like A River who has two children as main characters who surely are miniature adults, and as a writer, you scratch your head and think, I thought "the rule" was not to have children talk or act so adult-like. Newsday said, "What allows Peace Like A River to transcend any limitations of belief and genre is its broad, sagacious humanity...There is magic here, none more potent that Lief Enger's prose."

Wow. That's a pretty powerful statement.

I think the same thing could be said of Whitlow's Jimmy.

And, Jimmy is truly a Christian love story. Between a boy and his parents.