The Wonderful Adventures of Nils - Book 17

I read this on the kindle which combined The Wonderful Adventures with the Further Adventures.

Well, my reading pace slowed considerable due to life happening.  So I just finished this book, I guess my final book, for the Children's Literature Challenge of April (um, it's May 7th already!  How'd that happen???).

Selma Lagerlof looking pretty schoolmarmish.  

This book was so captivating.  I had no real idea of what it was about when I started it.  It was written by Selma Lagerlof of Sweden, the first woman to win the Nobel prize for literature.  She was a school teacher who wrote on the side.  After she became more and more well known, she stopped teaching and began writing full time.  But at some point in her career, when her writing was taking off but she was still teaching, they (not sure who) asked her to write a Geography book.  This book is very much in the same vein as Charlotte Mason and Waldorf type books of the late 19th century/early 20th century, where didactic books were written using imaginative narratives to convey the information.  For instance in Waldorf, they teach math facts using 'gnomes.'  Some popular books that taught science were Madam How and Lady Why by Charles Kingsley or The Fairy-Land of Science by Arabella Buckley.  So that's what The Wonderful Adventures of Nils is, a way of teaching Swedish geography to school children.  So you would think the publishers would have thought to at least put a map of Sweden in this book.  But no they didn't!  I found myself googling maps of Sweden so I could get a better understanding of what the author was talking about.  Major oversight there!

Nils is a not very nice young man who gets himself turned into an elf and winds up flying all over Sweden on the back of a white goosey-gander from his farm.  The white goose has always wanted to fly north to Lapland with the wild geese and Nils happens upon him just as he has decided to undertake this journey.

Not only is this book a geography book, it is also a quest for Nils as he learns to care about others and becomes a likable, brave and responsible young man.  It also weaves many folk and fairytales into the epic.  The author even very cleverly injects herself into the book.  And all this is done with great grace so that I never felt like it was heavy handed in any way.  Like real fairy tales (not the cleaned up modern retellings) some dark things happen.  Real things like death, have to be confronted.  We come to love Akka, the wise old leader of the wild geese (who is a female goose).  We meet the evil and cunning fox, Smirre.  We meet the proud but loyal Gorgo, the golden eagle.  We keep catching sight of Osa and Little Mats the other goose keepers that Nils knows in real life.  They are having their own epic journey and we don't find out exactly what is happening to them until the end.

The amazing thing to me was how the author conveyed the sensation of flying.  She must have gone up in a balloon or an early plane.  Honestly, some of descriptions gave me the sensation of flying while I was reading them!  We swoop all over Sweden from forest, to coast line, out to islands along the coast, to cities big and small, over streams and rivers and lakes, castles and tiny hamlets, farms, marshes, mountains and waterfalls.   We see miners and lumberjacks, factories and fishermen.

*Dover published this title but it only includes the first book and not the continuing adventures.  It stops pretty abruptly.  I advise making sure you read both books as the story is much more satisfying.
An excellent story written by an excellent author.  I thoroughly enjoyed traveling with Nils.  Two thumbs up!

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