Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates by Mary Mapes Dodge

“Hans Brinker” hits a series of high notes and encourages children to cultivate and display their finer qualities. This all leads up to a dramatic, moving, and entirely satisfactory conclusion. The novel Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates takes place in the Netherlands and is a colorful fictional portrait of early 19th-century Dutch life. Hans improbably meets the one man who might be able to heal his father, and somehow Hans finds a way to afford some skates so that he and Gretel can enter the race. In the weeks leading up to the race, we follow the adventures of five of the local boys who are showing a visiting relative from England the sights of the Netherlands. Then a glorious skating race is proposed for the town of Broek, with the prize a pair of silver skates for both the winning boy and girl. Their social standing is very low, but they both attract firm friends, even among the gentry, for their honesty, industry, and good-heartedness. Despite their unfortunate circumstances, Hans and Gretel are cheerful children, yet always attentive to the needs of their mother and their present-but-not-really-there father. With no steady income, the family’s lot is grinding poverty.

The Brinkers are a poor but stoic family under a dark cloud – Raff, the man of the house, fell from the dikes while reinforcing them during a bad storm, and for ten years he has been in a vegetative state. Dodge writes as if she is sending a series of letters from Holland to children in America, and her you-are-there perspective is aided by a nice attention to detail and vivid imagery.

It is a tale written for children that adults also find interesting and uplifting. With a skillful introduction to the genre and notes on each story by Sims, The Phantom Coach is a spectacular collection of ghostly Victorian thrills.Mary Mapes Dodge created an instant bestseller with “Hans Brinker or The Silver Skates.” She wanted the book to be partly a book of travels and partly a domestic story. Jacobs ('The Monkey’s Paw') will turn you white as a sheet. Edwards’s chilling story gives the collection its title, while Ambrose Bierce ('The Moonlit Road'), Elizabeth Gaskell ('The Old Nurse’s Story'), and W. The Phantom Coach includes tales by a surprising and often legendary cast, including Charles Dickens, Margaret Oliphant, Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, and Arthur Conan Doyle, as well as lost gems by forgotten masters such as Mary E. Michael Sims, whose previous Victorian collections Dracula’s Guest (vampires) and The Dead Witness (detectives) have been widely praised, has gathered twelve of the best stories about humanity’s oldest supernatural obsession. Ghost stories date back centuries, but those written in the Victorian era have a unique atmosphere and dark beauty.

Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates by Mary Mapes Dodge