Reviewing Hans Brinker (or, The Silver Skates) by Mary Mapes Dodge

Winter Landscape with Skaters on a Frozen Lake by Dutch painter Anthonie Beerstraten

Mary Mapes Dodge’s classic, Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates is one of the (many) books I remember my mom reading to my brother and I when she home-schooled us. From that original reading I remembered the main character, Hans Brinker, his sister, the skating race with a prize of the silver skates, that they lived in Holland, and that his father had been brain damaged from a fall off the dykes and was the only one who knew where their money had been hidden, thus causing them to live in abject poverty for a long time.

I remembered liking the book, and so decided to re-read it this winter, as the atmosphere is appropriately frigid for reading a story centered around an ice-skating contest.

Except, much to my surprise upon re-reading, the contest—and the silver skates themselves—figure very little into the plot.

Even more to my surprise was how little Hans Brinker himself figured in the plot!

I had no recollection from my mom’s first reading aloud to me of the long tangents the story takes, mostly following a gang of boys skating around Holland, sight-seeing and conversing all about Dutch history and art and literature. Which of course is the sort of thing teenage boys like to do in their free time. But realism aside, what’s really sad is this gang of boys doesn’t even include Hans Brinker, but rather a ton of other feebly-developed characters distinguishable from each other only by slight stereotypes:

• Peter van Holp, the “Captain” and ringleader, impossibly perfect not only because he’s rich and handsome and one of the best skaters, but also because of the perfect way he treats every person he meets
• Ludwig van Holp, Peter’s younger brother, which is pretty much the only thing I remember about him
• Voostenwalbert Schimmelpenninck, the littlest of the group with the most unwieldy name
• Carl Schummel, the snobbish, arrogant, and unpleasant one
• Jacob Poot, the likeable but overweight and lazy one
• Benjamin Dobbs, Jacob’s cousin visiting from England, and the main excuse the author uses for all the sight-seeing and talking about history and Dutch culture
• Lambert van Mounen, the only other boy who speaks English and therefore serves as interpreter between Ben and the other boys

I didn’t pay much attention to these characters’ introductions as I came across them, figuring they were minor secondary characters to Hans Brinker. In retrospect this was a mistake, as we probably spend as much—maybe even MORE—of the story with them as with the Brinkers.  And even when the plot does revolve around the Brinker home, it focuses just as much on Hans’ sister Gretel or his mother as it does on the titular character himself.

It’s tempting to say that this is just as well, as Hans Brinker as a character is flat and dull, except that pretty much every other character suffers from this anyway. Maybe because I’ve read a lot more literature from the period as an adult than I had as a child, but almost everything about this book seemed to draw on the worst conventions of 19^th century storytelling conventions. The brave, silently suffering mother; the loyal sacrificial son, the young daughter who is pretty and emotional. Even the secondary characters like Peter, and the other girl characters of Hilda van Gleck and Annie Bouman, are too good to be true, showing up to give help to the main characters at the most coincidental moments.

Coincidence is also something this story relies heavily upon. Just when Hans needs a doctor, there one goes, passing him on the street! And the doctor is usually a real Scrooge, but coincidentally Hans looks like his long-lost son and so touches a hidden soft spot so that he agrees to help him! Oh, but days before the doctor is to come, Hans’ father takes a turn for the worst…but never fear, because it just so happens Peter and his posse are headed towards the town where the doctor is, and can take a message to him from Hans! It’s super convenient that the doctor’s initial diagnosis of Mr. Brinker’s ailment is exactly what was wrong (and a good thing, too, since his first method of treatment was trepanning in a probably unsanitary environment). And that’s just the beginning of the coincidences that help tie up all loose ends as the story comes to a close.

To conclude, here is a list of times the plot completely forgets that the book is Hans Brinker (or the Silver Skates, for that matter):

• All but the last two paragraphs of Chapter 2: Holland
• The second half of Chapter 3: The Silver Skates
• Starting in Chapter 9: The Festival of St. Nicholas, Pages 48-75
• Starting at Chapter 16: Haarlem – The Boys Hear Voices, pages 84-161

The copy I read was an annotated Children’s Press, Inc. edition from 1969 (and the oh-so-‘60s illustrations leave no doubt as to the publication date!), and was a total of 248 pages. Of this total, 113 pages were devoted to non-Brinker topics or characters. If the book were edited to be solely about the Brinker family and their many difficulties and mysteries, the story would be only 135 pages long. I’m wondering if this is what my mom did when she read it. Because I certainly don’t recall all that talk of pincushions being hung on doors to signify births in the household, and that seems like the sort of strange detail I would remember!