What do children ask about Tesla and “Magical Sails”?

How do you explain Nikola Tesla to a child without turning him into a dry lesson?

When I was writing Magical Sails, I did not want to hand children yet another biography of Nikola Tesla. I wanted to open the door onto his world and let them ask the questions themselves.

Children ask the best questions.

Did Tesla know as a child that he would become a genius? Was he afraid? Why did he love pigeons? Did he really make lightning? How could he picture an invention before he built it?

And my favourite:

“Could I invent something too?”

Perhaps that is exactly why children are so drawn to Tesla. His life already has all the ingredients of a great adventure: an unusual boy, lightning, experiments, journeys, big ideas, triumphs — and also moments of being misunderstood and alone.

In Magical Sails history is not a lesson but a space a child is allowed to step into. Through the adventures of Luka, Lana and the fairy Anđelina, real events meet literary imagination, and Tesla stops being just a stern face in an old photograph: he becomes a man the child wants to know more about.

And then another important question tends to appear:

“But did this really happen?”

I love that question. It means the story has awakened curiosity.

Tesla is real. The historical places and many of the events in the book are real. Magical Sails is a literary adventure that builds its magical world in between those facts, and for me that is where the most important thing begins.

I do not want a child to close the book and say only: “Now I know more about Tesla.”

I would like them to say:

“I want to find out more.”

And most of all:

“I have an idea.”

Because perhaps Tesla’s greatest legacy is not only in what he invented. Perhaps it is also in the fact that his story can still prompt a child to look at the world around them and ask:

“What if it could be done differently?”

That is why Magical Sails “flew” across the ocean and arrived exactly where I wanted it to: at children’s curiosity.

Maja C. S.

Maya Story — the voice of childhood | Family literature