Alexis' Book Blog

The Wheel on the School

by Meindert DeJong

Pictures by Maurice Sendak

1955 Newbery Gold Medal for Outstanding Contribution to Children’s Literature

Ages 10 & Up

Review by Sandra Miller-Louden

I started this book with a prejudice against it.  First was the title—what did it mean?  Second, I’ve been reading Newbery Gold winners since 2004 at a steady pace and found some to be outstanding, others mediocre and still others definitely not for children, but rather aimed at librarians who cast the deciding votes as to which book receives the Gold.  And while no particular era has a stranglehold on the “outstanding, mediocre or not-for-children” designations, books written in certain decades have definite characteristics peculiar to that decade.

The Wheel on the School, written in 1954, is told in third person, not in today’s more “hip” first person.  It has chapters and chapter titles which immediately tends to date it (although which personally I find to be charming).  Children are part of a two-parent home, where father works as a fisherman and mother tends the home.  The teacher is treated with respect and, in turn, treats his students with fairness, yet with discipline.  And while the children take a huge role in defining and solving problems, they are still guided by adults.  They are not more “in touch” than adults and do not, at the end of the day, miraculously solve all situations that their parents or teachers were too jaded, preoccupied or clueless to understand, define or do anything about.  This slant is definitely at odds with today’s focus.

By Chapter 3 of The Wheel on the School, I was hooked, however and stayed that way until I finished it.  The premise is simple:  When something seems impossibly impossible, that’s the time to believe it just must happen—and so it will.  In this story, the “impossibly impossible” is having storks return to the fishing village of Shora in Holland (today’s Netherlands).  Lina, one of six school-age children in the tiny village, starts it all when she writes an essay for school that asks why there are no storks in Shora.  Her teacher encourages the class (consisting of Lina and five boys) to find out for themselves. Through talking with their parents and neighbors, they find out that besides having no trees (except for a cherry tree in the yard of a scary man named Janus) where a stork would feel protected, the village also only has steeply-pitched, pointed roofs where the storks cannot find space to nest.  They’re told that placing a wagon wheel on each roof would give storks a flat, comfortable place to nest.

Armed with this information, their teacher then sends them out to find a wagon wheel and advises them to “look for a wagon wheel where one is and where one isn’t; where one could be and where one couldn’t possibly be.”

And so they do.  And as they do, they discover many things along the way.  Lina talks to an old woman in the village and understands for the first time, the way the village used to be. Two of her classmates, twins Pier and Dirk, encounter Janus in his wheelchair and find out he’s not as mean as everyone thinks.  Above all, the children are finding out about determination, disappointment, working together and not always believing everything that’s in print.  These and other subtle themes are gently woven throughout the text—simultaneously a page turner loaded with adventure combined with a poignant, simple story capable of reminding us that dreams can become reality.  If ever there were a book tailor-made for a movie, this is it.  I’m stunned no one has stepped forward to make it.

If you have children in your life who are not natural readers, read this book to them.  If you don’t, read this book anyway.  You won’t be sorry.