Gained in Translation

For years, I've waited for my thoroughly Dutch children to get old enough to lose themselves in my childhood favorites. Our bookshelves have patiently housed these thirty-year-old beauties, some the worse for multiple readings, for ages. Narnia. Little House on the Prairie. Harriet the Spy. Nancy Drew. Dominic. Freaky Friday. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. A Wrinkle in Time. And a hundred more.

For the last couple of years, whenever the kids have complained of a bookless nightstand, I've eagerly trotted out my childhood treasures. Alas: no go. Oh, there's been an occasional glum attempt (largely to please me, I suspect) that fizzled out just pages into the story. Some inexplicably baffling somehow, the books just didn't take.

And then it hit me. By the time my children's English is sufficient to revel in the wonder, they'll be too old for the wonder to work its magic. They'll have missed Alice in wonderland, Mary in the secret garden. 

So we've started a whole new library, full of my childhood favorites in translation.