My eleven-year-old daughter came to me tonight talking about The Count of Monte Cristo. She spoke of it in detail: names, betrayals, even the quiet moments I had half-forgotten. When she finished, I asked what she liked most about it. She didn’t hesitate. “Revenge,” she said.
It startled me a little, not because of the word itself, but because of the clarity with which she said it. Children rarely speak of abstractions with such conviction. Yet there it was, revenge, bright and simple, like a spark in her eyes.
I thought about what that means at eleven. At that age, the world still feels like a system that should make sense. Good should win. Justice should come. Pain should be answered. Revenge, to a child, is not cruelty; it is symmetry. It restores balance to a world that often feels rigged.
Adults learn to live without that symmetry. We call it forgiveness, or wisdom, or simply exhaustion. We stop believing that the scales will ever even out. But a child still believes in the possibility of the perfect reckoning, the neat correction that life rarely delivers.
Maybe that is why The Count of Monte Cristo speaks to her. It is not about blood; it is about power reclaimed, injustice reversed, a man remaking the order of things. It is the fantasy of control in a world that so often leaves us powerless.
When my daughter said she liked revenge, I realized she was not talking about hurting anyone. She was talking about the righting of wrongs, the restoration of meaning. In that sense, her fascination was not dark at all; it was moral. Maybe children reach for revenge because they have not yet learned to live with the unfinished.
And maybe that is what growing up really is: learning that not every wrong will be avenged, and not every wound will close cleanly, yet still finding a way to live without bitterness.
And when my daughter is older and reads The Count of Monte Cristo again, she will close the book and hopefully realize that real revenge is living well enough that the past can no longer wound us.