A lot of writers can’t fake it when it comes to kids. This isn’t their fault necessarily: many simply don’t know children and struggle to imagine them. Rarely does a writer get it right. Putting a firm cap on childlike whimsy, authors force fictional kids to focus on the boring world of adults or arrive at conclusions that are beyond their years. Kid speech as interpreted by adults is either sloppily dull or too perfect to be real, like that of a wizened baby Jesus from medieval iconography, an incongruous post-puberty voice issuing from an infant’s mouth. 

But Eileen Kelly, the author of Small Wonder, clearly knows kids — real kids with real voices. And in her delicious bite of a debut novel, she lets them speak, linguistic warts and all. 

Kelly is the empress of the small, bright description, the quick turn of phrase that makes you gasp with recognition. In Small Wonder, she paints the world of children in gleaming ROY G. BIV colors. Her fictional preschool is described as a “happy lunatic asylum”; a little boy in the class named Jonah sleeps “curled like a cashew”; the older kids spend their playtime “beetling over the climbing structures.” Here is how Tina, a sometimes-dopey preschool teacher and young mother in Park Slope, prepares to present her classroom to parents at Curriculum Night:

What she wants to say stays in her mind. Every day here is an opera, with spears and winged helmets and horses onstage, except that all the performers are three feet tall and drunk. Tragedies and rhapsodies. Naptimes, they sleep like battlefield survivors. Where Tina works, everyone always speaks truth from the heart. She ends conflicts by picking up the combatants and carrying them out of the room. We talk about good and evil every day.

Finally, writing that feels unexpected yet true to how children experience the world! 

Small Wonder follows both Tina and Darla, a girl the same age as Tina’s son, whose explosive mother has recently died by falling off a cliff. The two are linked by Darla’s younger brother Jonah, who causes trouble in Tina’s preschool class, and by her father Patrick, who charms Tina. Their stage is the parks and brownstones of Brooklyn’s Park Slope, which comes equipped with all the features you might expect of a loudly-liberal, family-friendly neighborhood: “exercise-orexic” mothers, weed-smoking fathers, and various other coded evidences of family money, all thrown into relief by Tina’s non-monied perspective.

It’s a tense little book. Much of the anxiety comes from Kelly’s delicate balancing of Tina’s and Darla’s perspectives. Throughout, Darla serves mostly to undermine Tina; she reveals layers of her own neglect as Tina is lulled into a sense of safety by Patrick. The truth of what really happened to Darla’s mother also gets untangled slowly, because unlike in the preschool classroom, not everyone always speaks truth from the heart on the mean streets of Park Slope. 

Since the nature of good and evil is a key preoccupation for the parents in Small Wonder, it seems worthwhile to examine what exactly it means to them. Early on, mom-friend Louisa tells Tina, “There is no such thing as a ‘Bad Seed.’ Although I was reading they can identify sociopathic tendencies in babies now.” This conversation sets up one of the central questions in this book: Can Darla be saved from evil, or is she a bad seed, hurtling toward a foregone terrible conclusion? 

Over the course of the novel, Darla commits bigger and bigger wrongs, starting with lying about seeing her mother’s ghost, then escalating to outright violence against Byron, a boy in her class (“Darla hates the fat boy so much she would like to bite him and swallow the pieces”), all presumably motivated by her grief, or possibly some genetic predisposition. Darla’s neglect and her evil are clearly correlated; when the former rises, so does the latter. As Tina puts it, “Darla has a quality Tina is sensitive to: she is ugly the way you are ugly when you’re unloved.”

Tina, by contrast, is incontrovertibly good. She’s also the type of person to whom things just happen — the last conscious decision she made was to go on vacation in Italy, where her son Matty arose from a one-night stand, changing everything in his wake: “Sometimes, while planting kisses, Tina has to hide one hand and snap her fingers three times, the counter-curse, because the thought has come to her again: [Matty] is the best part of her life, and he is the piano that fell from the sky and ended it.” Ever since his birth, Tina has coasted on the kindness of others, pessimistic about the world yet naively trusting of the humans in it. She lives precariously, barely skating by at work and dwelling in the basement of another mother whose child she babysits to supplement her low rent, where she has worn out her welcome. As Tina gets sucked into the atmosphere of Darla’s broken family, she puts herself further at risk.

There is a humdrum logic to fate in Small Wonder: Darla will never be good because, as Kelly seems to insist, hurt people hurt people. But if that hurt is traced back, its source is pure, uninterrogated evil, an equal-opportunity villain whose motives are obtuse. All the preschool talk about good and evil doesn’t create profound meaning about how evil works, or how to prevent it in our children; and in Kelly’s choice to turn up the drama in the last few moments of the book, Kelly unfortunately sacrifices some of the thoughtful beauty of her writing — that breathtaking realness is in part squandered for the plot. 

Still, the novel is a treat, literary yet suspenseful. In addition to generously entering children’s inner worlds, it treats a cast of characters marked with mental illness with revelatory joy and affection. (Some of the best moments in the book are given to us by Uncle Todd, Patrick’s neurodivergent frenemy from college, who shows up one day smiling creepily at the children on the playground and then quickly becomes an indispensable part of their lives.) Small Wonder is a great read for anyone interested in the lives we build around children — more than anything else, because it is filled with reminders of childlike wonder that is no less magical for being small.

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Eileen Kelly lives in Stephentown, New York, where she writes development documents for criminal justice and mental health nonprofits and fiction for children and adults. A winner of a Hopwood Award in the Novel from the University of Michigan’s MFA program, she has published stories in the Tupelo Quarterly and Wrongdoing Magazine. Small Wonder is her first novel.

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Originally from Park Slope, Hannah Rice Berman is a former teacher turned freelance journalist and fiction writer. You can find her writing in Brooklyn Magazine, Public Seminar, HAD, and Maudlin House, among others. Read more at her website.