by Shimanto (Robin) Reza 

Kid lit is alive and kicking in Flanders and the Netherlands. Decades ago, Lowlands writers gave the world Annie M.G. Schmidt and the Belgian comic. Today, they give us more weird and wondrous reads than I can keep track of. There’s even a press dedicated to translated Dutch picture books, Clavis Publishers.

How to choose just three titles for a review? It is of course weird and probably illegal to judge a book by its translator. But like Tess in My Especially Weird Week with Tess, I kind of like weird, so what the heck. By the end of Anna Woltz’s middle-grade novel – brilliantly rendered into crisp and punchy English prose by Annie M.G. Schmidt translator David Colmer – you’ll know that you need to dare to do things your own way to reach others. The Starling’s Song by Octavie Wolters, Englished by the prizewinning Michele Hutchison, takes us on a winged tour of the mysteries of our world. Where the starling charms us with its lyrical wisdom, Garré and Huysmans in The Wonderful World of Water, translated by versatile non-fiction translator Anna Asbury, kindle our wonder with their scientific elegy to H2O, the humble molecule of life.

The Wonderful World of Water

Written by Sarah Garré and Marijke Huysmans
Illustrated by Wendy Panders
Translated by Anna Asbury
Translated from Dutch (Belgium)
Published by Prestel Publishing, 2023

Of course, you already know that the water on our planet probably came from icy meteors. And that vampire squids do exist, and that water boils at lower temperatures in the Alps. Nonetheless, I still recommend you read it with the children you love to help teach them about that vital molecule, and the related natural systems and infrastructures our lives are intricately bound up with. Water cycles, purification procedures, aqueducts – it’s all explained in graphic detail.

While the kids learn (again, you already knew all about this), you can enjoy the illustrations. Their colourfulness captures the weird wonder of a world we have so easily taken for granted, and the abundance of details rewards many re-readings. Have you spotted Poseidon, a one- and a two-humped camel, or a certain braided scourge of Big Polluters, sporting her bright-yellow Mac? If you’ve found her, you’ll see that all she’s doing is pointing to the polar bear, sat on a shrinking iceberg. The Wonderful World of Water doesn’t need any finger-wagging either – displaying the facts is enough to remind us that, if we want to remain part of this one-of-a-kind world of water, we’d better start living in it more consciously.

The Starling’s Song

Written and illustrated by Octavie Wolters
Translated by Michele Hutchison
Translated from Dutch (Netherlands)
Published by Pushkin Press, 2023

I had no idea Pushkin Press published children’s books – now I know where I’ll find my nieces’ next birthday presents. The hero of The Starling’s Song flies past a panorama of rolling hills to a world tree, along a river, high above a rocky landscape, and beyond, gathering the life lessons of the birds and finally putting it all in his song. Wolters’ and Hutchison’s pithy, poetic dialogues are full of genuine wisdom. For instance, the opening shows how the starling is struck by the beauty of the world, and that this is what kindles its desire to journey, explore, and sing. This idea can be traced all the way back to Plato (and probably far beyond). The all-embracing song the starling composes at the end can make you feel a sense of overflowing love and wonder worthy of a picture book-writing Whitman. Pushkin Press’s commitment to harvesting titles from all over the world brings an amazing variety of styles to their catalogue of picture books. The Starling’s Song opts for an elegant black and white, with a few splashes of yellow identifying our starling. The illustrations express each bird’s message, like in the kingfisher’s spread, where the entire scene is reflected in the water – including the words, which are printed upside down! Such touches can delight young and old(er) readers alike.

My Especially Weird Week with Tess

Written by Anna Woltz
Translated by David Colmer
Translated from Dutch (Netherlands)
Published by Rock the Boat, 2023

It all happens during Sam and his family’s holiday on the island of Texel. This makes Woltz’s middle-grade adventure novel a perfect beach read. That is, if you’re not going to the Dutch Wadden Islands, where the beaches are cold and windy. Rather than spending time with his family there, who don’t seem to get him at all, Sam cycles around Texel with a local, Tess (Texel is pronounced “Tessel”). She’s weird and loud and has sticky fingers, but once they’ve learned to waltz together from an online tutorial, Sam realises that if you both have sticky fingers, it’s a good thing. Maybe it’s because she actually likes to spend time with him that he’s hell-bent on helping her get to know her father, in secret – secret in the sense that the poor man hasn’t a clue that he has a daughter, and she isn’t planning on telling him; and that Tess’s mum has never considered he’d ever come to this island. Maybe Sam is helping Tess because he likes her in a way he can’t yet put into words. Or maybe it’s because he knows that in helping her, he’s helping himself see his boring old family – married-and-still-together-with-two-kids-a-couple-years-apart – with new eyes. Tess’s is a weird world indeed. It’s when Sam and Tess embrace both their own and each other’s weirdness that things can sort of work out. That’s the kind of message that just doesn’t get old.

Meet Shimanto

Shimanto (Robin) Reza is a translator from Dutch. He also writes in both Dutch and English, but always prefers you wait for his next thing, which is going to be way better than what’s out there at the moment. (He’s working on a short story titled “Delay”.) Very recently, he has come to accept that pigeons will never stop being so tirelessly mean to each other. Regardless, he thinks the world needs stories about owls and ducks and robins who all get along. He will keep writing and reading until someone resolves this prickly paradox. Sunday mornings he likes to cycle out to the lake and watch the birds, then go home and do a squeaky imitation of their song on his tenor saxophone.