The Wheel on the School by Meindert DeJong

1955 | 320 pages | Grades 3-6 

This book won the Newbery Award back in 1955. I thought it would be interesting to see what the best literature was at that time. This is a story set in a small fishing village in Holland. I am not sure what the time period was but people are wearing wooden clogs and traditional clothing including the "Dutch" hats. The men in the village spend most of their time away from home fishing and there are only 6 children in the school. One day one of the students writes a report about the fact that storks don't come to their village. It is considered lucky to have a pair of storks on your housetop. The teacher challenges them to figure out how to remedy this problem. They decide that having a wheel on top of their roof will help the storks to want to build a nest on top of their roof. So they go out into their village and try to find wheels. They meet different people in their village as they try and get them to give them a wheel for the school. Lots of situations happen as they spread out and look for wheels. The quirky people of the village get invested in this project. 

This book made me so sleepy. I think it moves a little slowly and is repetitive. A few times I thought I was actually rereading a paragraph but it was just so similar. There were some parts of the book that I did laugh out loud. When the fathers were home because of a big storm, they were really funny. This book has such an unusual setting and I have never read anything like it. I looked for an audio version of this book and didn't find anything. I was hoping that it would help me in my reading. I did make it through the book with some skimming. I thought it was a good story but I just had a hard time staying awake.