The Wheel on the School

In the small Dutch fishing village of Shora, a schoolgirl named Lina writes a class essay wondering why storks no longer nest on the village rooftops the way old stories say they once did, a simple question that catches the imagination of her five classmates and sets the whole book in motion. The children investigate and discover a practical reason, the village's steeply pitched roofs give storks nowhere flat to build, and they hit on a solution: old fashioned wagon wheels, laid flat on a roof ridge, would give the birds a platform to nest on. What follows is less a single adventure than a chain of small quests, the children scattering across the village and the surrounding countryside to track down actual wagon wheels, enlisting a rotating cast of village adults along the way, an eel fisherman, a grumpy old woman, a boy with a crippled leg, each of whom turns out to have unexpected help to offer once approached with the children's earnest persistence. By the book's end a wheel has been mounted on the school roof, and the arrival of nesting storks rewards the children's patient, cooperative effort with the very thing Lina's original essay was only wondering about, the village adults who once brushed off a child's question ending the book as invested in the outcome as the children themselves.

It is gentle and cumulative rather than tense, built from short episodes that a young reader can follow one at a time, and its real subject is the way one child's curiosity, taken seriously, can pull an entire community into motion around her. Younger children may need help keeping the six classmates straight at first, since De Jong gives each one a distinct task and personality rather than treating them as an interchangeable group.