Hans Brinker
or the Silver Skates

by Mary Mapes Dodge
Edited by Kathryn Lindskoog
Illustrated by Patrick Wynne
Republished Fall, 2001
P&R Publishing

Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates is the story of a poverty-stricken brother and sister in the beautiful land of windmills, tulips, and wooden shoes. It is a story of championship skating, hunger and hardship, adventure and buried gold, a brain-damaged father and a long-lost son, and prayers come true. When I adopted a baby boy with Dutch ancestry 25 years ago, I named him Peter Lindskoog because I loved the Dutch boy named Peter in Hans Brinker. A few months ago I learned that the mother of a dear Dutch-ancestry friend of mine had named her first son Peter for the same reason.

In 1992 I got a wild hunch that Fuller Seminary's Lewis Smedes might know and love Hans Brinker, and so I wrote and asked him. He answered, "Hans Brinker was my best boyhood dream. Could I, if I tried terribly hard, become somebody like him? What a shame that hardly anybody knows Hans Brinker anymore! I am delighted that he is being brought back to life." (I brought him back to life mainly by eliminating outdated encyclopedia-style information about Holland.)

When she was a teenage girl, Mary Mapes Dodge had written unsigned articles for her father's agriculture magazine, letting readers assume she was a man. Later, as an adult widow with two young sons, she decided to write a book about Holland in spite of the fact that editors told her it would never sell. Hans Brinker made her famous overnight. When she was almost fifty, she finally went with one of her sons to see Holland for herself, and she loved it.

Quote from Article: Adapting the Classics