This is the second post in a series about increasing empathy through reading. The first post is here: https://jenunderwood.org/2025/05/03/empathy-through-reading-take-my-hand/

When I was in my early 20s, the Magic Eye posters* came out. They were hung in shopping malls (at least that’s where I encountered them), and people would gather around, stepping forward and backward, squinting and tilting their heads and torsos this way and that as they tried to see the image among the swirls and dots. Someone would cry out, “I got it! I see it!” followed by others asking, “How?” and then advice from the ones with the “sight.” Those left out of the “seeing” were told to look to the side, focus on a corner, not look directly at it…

Some of the books that have grown and informed my empathy have done so in a very similar way as the Magic Eye posters. I would be reading, enjoying the story simply as a story, or getting worked up about the plight of certain characters in the story, when suddenly I would have a realization that there was a correlation between the fictional story and flesh-and-blood people in the world I inhabited. 

As a middle and high school English teacher, I read a lot of young adult literature, both to suggest book titles to my students and also simply because I like YA lit. I thoroughly enjoyed Jeanne DePrau’s The City of Ember, with its post-apocalyptic tale of an underground city built to withstand an Earth-altering event and filled with orphaned babies too young to remember life on the Earth’s surface who are sent to the underground city with elderly caretakers who have taken an oath never to tell the children about a world other than their gloomy city. At the book’s beginning, it is 200 years and several generations later; the city’s resources and utilities are failing; and no one living in Ember has any idea that an outside world exists. Someone has to take a risk of finding a way to the surface before the lights go out forever.

It’s a fun story with interesting characters. And then I read the sequel, The People of Sparks. I remember early on thinking it wasn’t quite as engaging or original as the first book. But I was already invested in the characters, who had found a way out of their deteriorating underground city and onto the earth’s surface. I wanted them to make it, but it looks pretty hopeless at first. Then they find a small town inhabited by the descendants of those who survived the apocalypse on the earth’s surface. These people have figured out how to eke a living from the damaged soil and are finally producing enough that they can begin to plan for the future. They have named their town Sparks and have recently built a storehouse which they are filling with provisions for the lean winter months. They have worked hard, and they feel like they are finally making it.

And then the people of Ember, hungry and with absolutely no knowledge or skills that will aid them in this new world, arrive in their town. 

You can imagine what happens next. There is tension; there is the question of how much help is enough help; there is the dilemma of providing equal provision to persons whose lack of ability means they do not equally contribute.

The experience of reading this book was for me like looking at a Magic Eye poster. As I read this fantastical story, there was a moment when something shifted, and I could see something emerging in my real life. I’d been focused on the book, but it was as if my actual world was right behind it and I could see it differently. A Truth had emerged.

There’s a parable Jesus tells in the Gospels in which a landowner goes to the town square to hire people to work in his fields. He goes in the morning–hires some people; he goes at noon–hires some people; he goes in the mid-afternoon–hires some people. At the end of the day, he first gives pay to the last ones hired. He gives them a full day’s wage. Whoa, the others think, if they got a full day’s wage, I wonder how much WE’RE going to get? 

Psyche! They also get the full day’s wage. 

They complain: Hold on, this isn’t fair, we worked longer than they did; we should get more! They didn’t show up at the same time as we did! We were at the town square in the early morning and we worked all day long! 

The landowner responds: I told you that you would get a full day’s wage, and you did. There is no discrepancy. It is my choice to provide the same for the others. 

The People of Sparks was a story that shifted something in me that, once seen, could not be unseen. I’m still, even now, trying to live into the Truth—hinted at in Jesus’ parable—that was made clearer to me in my reading of that young adult novel series**. 

And finally, one other book recommendation that also had, for me, the Magic Eye effect: Little Bee by Chris Cleave*** (released as The Other Hand in Great Britain). It is about issues in Great Britain that are also issues in the U.S., and I found that little bit of distance helpful in shaping my thinking on issues in my own country. It is a fantastic, beautiful book—just a quick heads up that there are some violent scenes that are heart wrenching (but they are not gratuitous). 

*https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/the-hidden-history-of-magic-eye-the-optical-illusion-that-briefly-took-over-the-world/ 

**https://www.jeanneduprau.com/ 
***https://parnassusbooks.net/book/9781416589648 (link to an independent bookseller that sells Little Bee)