Journey from Peppermint Street by Meindert De Jong

First published: 1968

Subjects: Animals, emotions, family, and health and illness

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Adventure tale and psychological realism

Time of work: The early twentieth century

Recommended Ages: 10-13

Locale: A Frisian village in The Netherlands

Principal Characters:

• Siebren, a nine-year-old who feels restricted by his duties as caretaker of his baby brother and who is eager to venture beyond his own village
• Knillis, his baby brother, for whose sickly condition Siebren feels partly responsible
• Father, a carpenter, who is often absent from home
• Grandpa, whose dying sister occasions the journey on which Siebren accompanies him
• Aunt Hinka, Siebren’s great-aunt, who nurtures his need for confidence and acceptance
• Uncle Siebren, the giant deaf-mute with whom Siebren develops a relationship of genuine affection
• Wayfarer, the three-legged stray dog that melts Siebren’s fear of dogs into strong attachment and insistence of adoption

Form and Content

Journey from Peppermint Street is a warm, inspiring tale of a young boy’s journey toward wholeness. From the very first pages, the reader notes at once Siebren’s restiveness. He feels like he is on a leash as his busy, pregnant mother makes him take care of his brother Knillis, hour after hour. He chafes, evidenced by his disobedience to his mother when he takes Knillis for a walk to the town’s pond. Siebren is hungry for more freedom, more independence, more experience. He has never been beyond the borders of Weirom, their small village by the sea; his spirit craves discovery.

Author Meindert De Jong sets the situation up well. Siebren is in need of a change of scenery, and Grandpa obliges. He gets word that his older sister Anna is sick and may not live long, and he sets out to see his sister one more time. Grandpa agrees to take Siebren along; he will stay with Hinka, his great-aunt, in an abandoned monastery on the edge of the marsh. Siebren is ecstatic and, since he is the narrator, the reader experiences intimately the boy’s deeply felt emotions—giddy anticipation at the outset, soon giving way to fear and anxiety. At heart, this is the story of a journey through childhood fears to a final destination of quiet, happy confidence.

The journey begins slowly. Walking gives one a lot of time to think, especially when not much happens along the way. In the first village through which they pass, Grandpa cleverly wards off an attack by a dog, much to Siebren’s relief. What intrigues Siebren even more, however, is his discovery that Grandpa and the Miller of Nes have had a long-term dispute over seventeen cents that has turned them into enemies. Against the backdrop of that adult conflict, Siebren is won over by a dog, a helpless, crippled, hungry little runt that follows him and successfully begs for his compassion. The boy names him Wayfarer.

After some scary encounters and misadventures that speed up the action, Grandpa and Siebren finally reach the ancient monastery in which Aunt Hinka and Uncle Siebren make their home. That night, Siebren tries to sleep in a room with a cistern in the middle of it that contains Vrosk, the noisy frog. It is a wondrous new world for young Siebren, a world that both frightens and awes him. In the days that follow, he encounters a dead rat, a newborn calf, the biggest pike ever caught, and a subterranean tunnel that keeps them safe when a tornado blows the roof off the monastery, in addition to huge Uncle Siebren, who can neither hear nor talk, and little Aunt Hinka, who speaks to his heart and nurtures his confidence.

Because Aunt Anna has died, Grandpa must stay longer. It is his deaf-mute but lovable uncle who takes Siebren back home to Weirom and his anxious parents, who have been hearing dire reports about the tornado’s destruction. Yet, all is well that ends well: Siebren returns to a loving family, where little Knillis for the first time says his big brother’s name and where even Wayfarer is waiting eagerly for a reunion with his young master.

Critical Context

Journey from Peppermint Street earned for Meindert De Jong the National Book Award for Children’s Literature and is the last story that featured the Frisian setting of his childhood. At a time when books for younger readers increasingly reflected the harsher realities of a troubled world, this novel exuded the enduring virtues of a stable community full of trustworthy adults and traditional values, and it found a receptive and appreciative audience. Many readers had loved other De Jong books, including those that also had the author’s birthplace of Weirom (Wierum) as their setting, such as The Wheel on the School (1954). That Newbery Medal-winning book begins with a child whose quest for bringing back the storks to town eventually energizes the whole community. Far out the Long Canal (1964), like Journey from Peppermint Street, deals tenderly with a young boy’s yearnings for experience and connectedness. All these stories and De Jong’s others impress with their strong sense of place, rooted as they are in the author’s vivid childhood memories of dikes, floods, ice, and people. The particularity of a place and a culture, however, invariably accrues the universal, as it does in the books of De Jong and of Katherine Paterson, through the moving, insightful depiction of children who need the healing wholeness of confidence, courage, and love. Many of Meindert De Jong’s books are still in print and continue to be read by young readers and their parents. Ironically, Journey from Peppermint Street is not.