The moment is where Impulse Intelligence begins.                                                                

There is actually a substantial body of children’s-literature scholarship examining something very close to what I’m seeing in these reviews: the tendency of adults to decide in advance what children can understand.

One particularly interesting line of scholarship examines what has been called an “adultist” approach—the tendency for adults to theorize about children’s reading while paying insufficient attention to how children themselves actually respond to and make meaning from texts.

That matters because adults don’t simply bring a book to a child. They bring assumptions about what a child should understand, how a children’s book should work, what constitutes an appropriate lesson, and how much interpretation a child should be expected to do.

Research involving preservice teachers is particularly revealing. Initially, many approached children’s literary responses primarily through comprehension—privileging the text and their own assumptions about what constituted a correct or appropriate response. After actually observing and working with children, however, their thinking shifted toward interpretation, personal response, social connection, and the child’s own meaning-making.

In other words, the adults’ assumptions changed when they actually paid attention to the child.

And then there’s the problem of online reviews.

The explosion of online reviews has created an enormous public audience of children’s-literature critics. That’s potentially wonderful. But it also raises a fundamental question: What happens when readers approach children’s literature with a fixed idea of what a children’s book is supposed to be?

Because a reader never simply receives a book.

A reader brings an entire interpretive framework with them.

And sometimes that framework is so firmly established that anything outside it gets forced back into familiar categories.

That is what has fascinated me while reading some of the responses to Rusty Ruins the Fort and Other Important Things.

They aren’t approaching it with fresh air blowing through their brains.

They’re approaching it with minds that are dark, dusty attics—full of old assumptions about what a children’s book is supposed to be.

And that distinction matters.

A book that requires interpretation is not necessarily a book that has failed to explain itself.

Children’s literature has a long and legitimate tradition of using ambiguity, metaphor, personification, multiple interpretations, and conceptual challenges. Some books deliberately leave room for the reader to participate in constructing meaning rather than spoon-feeding a predetermined conclusion.

That is particularly relevant to Rusty Ruins.

The book is not simply saying, “Here is an emotion. Here is what you should do about it.”

It is asking the reader to notice something more complicated:

Emotion → reaction → impulse → behavior.

And those things are not interchangeable.

So when a reviewer confidently describes the Flickerlings as “emotions,” when the central conceptual purpose of the characters is precisely to distinguish reactions and impulses from emotions, something interesting has happened.

The reviewer hasn’t necessarily discovered that the book is incomprehensible.

They may have brought a familiar framework to the book and interpreted everything through it.

And perhaps that is one of the most interesting things these reviews are revealing.

Sometimes the difficulty isn’t in the book.

Sometimes the difficulty is getting an old framework out of the way long enough to see what the book is actually doing.The Flickerlings were created to make something children experience every day—the moment between feeling something and reacting to it—visible and easier to talk about.

The Flickerlings are aware of the boys long before the boys become aware of them, and that awareness develops gradually throughout the story. The cascade of thoughts, feelings, impulses, and distractions reflects the busy, darting quality of a young mind. It is meant to pull readers into that experience while keeping them engaged with the story.

In this distracting age, this book isn’t trying to make a child’s mind behave like a traditional children’s book. It is trying to meet that mind where it is—darting, curious, impulsive, imaginative, and easily pulled in different directions—and give children a way to notice what is happening inside them before they react.

The Flickerlings: A New Way of Looking at Reactions

Rusty Ruins the Fort and Other Important Things introduces a concept that may be unfamiliar to both adults and children:

Flickerlings are not emotions. They are the reactions that can arise after an emotion and push us toward action.

That distinction is central to the story.

Many children’s books about emotional learning focus on identifying and naming emotions such as anger, fear, sadness, and happiness. Rusty Ruins the Fort takes a different approach. It asks the reader to look one step further:

What happens after the feeling?

A child can feel angry—and then experience an urge to yell, a sudden impulse to act, a reflexive response, a distraction, or another reaction. The emotion and the reaction are not the same thing.

That is the thinking the Flickerlings are designed to make visible.

The variety of Flickerlings is intentional. They represent the many different thoughts, impulses, urges, distractions, and reactions that can arise in the wake of an emotional experience. They are not a collection of emotion mascots, and they are not intended to correspond to a fixed set of basic emotions.

The story is asking readers to learn a new distinction:

EVENT → EMOTION → REACTION → PAUSE → CHOICE

By the final chapters, the boys begin noticing the strange thoughts and competing impulses inside themselves, culminating in Theo’s creation of Hank’s Field Guide. At the same time, the boys are beginning to grow out of their imaginary world and leave Hank behind.

The Field Guide represents what they carry forward from that world: a new way of noticing what happens inside them before they act.

The Flickerlings are not about stopping emotions or eliminating impulses. They are about learning to notice them—and discovering that there can be a moment between the feeling and the reaction when a choice becomes possible.

That moment is where Impulse Intelligence begins.