This is a book I've read once before, but did like back then. It's originally a Dutch book, however it has been translated into English, though I'm not sure how popular it is outside of the Netherlands. Anyways, let's dive in. Spoilers ahead.
Quick note: This is my review of the original Dutch version of the book. I've heard that the English translation leaves some things to be desired, but have not read said edition myself.
Rudolf "Dolf" is a teenager who, for a test experiment of a time machine, is beamed back to the year 1212, where he ends up stuck with no way to return to the present. He ends up coming across a children's crusade, and is horrified at the awful state the children are in. Dolf decides to use his twentieth-century knowledge, common sense and tools to help the giant group of eight thousand children. But one of the monks leading the children, Anselmus, is very disgruntled at this and brands Dolf a heretic. Worse yet, Dolf slowly starts to suspect that something about this crusade is off.
I still greatly enjoy this read, actually more than last time I read it (when I gave it three stars). But yeah, this is a super solid book. It's not only emotional, adventures and intense, it's also partially educative about the point in time Dolf ended up in, with there being some paragraphs to explain how things worked back then. Very cool that Beckman managed to put these two together.
The book does require some suspense of disbelief (like why would these professors pretty much instantly agree to test this time machine on a boy, especially without his parents' consent), but if you can buy the time machine stuff everything else is pretty straightforward.
Dolf, while branded a hero (or heretic) by the 1212 people around him, is by no means some kind of great savior or even really all that capable. He's just a twentieth-century kid with a basic education and common sense, but that's honestly what I like about him. It'd have been easy to make him some kind of genius, but really he's just seen as one by the people of the past because he's from the future and nothing else. He's just a kid from modern times who cares a whole lot about the plight of these children. Which is just an admirable trait. I really expected initially that Dolf would just try hopelessly to get back home, but instead he pretty soon after he realizes he's stuck in the past just accepts his face and joins the children's crusade to help the people there. It's not until (near the end of the book) he realizes there is a way back for him that he actually starts to consider going back to his modern time.
Is the book perfect, though? I wouldn't say that. There's some badly dated aspects (e.g. Dolf using the Dutch version of the N-word at one point and wanting to paint the children in blackface to scare off knights) but thankfully those are very, very minor and definitely a product of the time when the author was writing this (not that it excuses racism).
That aside, I really wish that there was some more longing to go back to his family from Dolf. While it's noble that he's caring so much for the children of the crusade, we barely ever see him longing to go home to his family again. It's nowhere implied he has a bad home life in his modern time, so why he barely seems to think about his mother and father just confuses me. I get that he has accepted he can't go home, but he can still think back about his life before then.
We actually know very little of Dolf before he entered the time machine other than a few throwaway lines, and while I can see him accepting his situation, it still feels very unrealistic to just barely have him long back to his modern times. Sure, he misses things such as the simple comforts of the twentieth century and tools such as modern medicine that would be able to help the children better, but he's very rarely shown longing for his actual home life back then. I don't know, I'd have liked a little more information about what his life was like before and to show him longing to go back, just for a bit more realism. You cannot convince me that a sixteen-year-old with an average home life who is surrounded by children constantly dying around him in medieval times isn't longing to go home once every wile.
Finally, I do appreciate that this book has a bit of a balance in the religious-logical side of things, the conflict which is a central theme in the book. Dolf is (obviously) from modern times and also not religious. The children and monks he is traveling with are very religious, and these two often clash. Dolf isn't an antitheist or anything, but he does belief in using common sense and not leaving everyone's fate in the hands of God if it can be helped. This in turn oftentimes shocks the children and monks, who see many of his exploits as sacrilegious.
Still, Dolf manages to gather a following who start to believe that perhaps he was sent by God instead of being a heretic, but he has just as many people opposing him. The whole clash between belief in the divine versus taking matters into your own hands is often at play here, and it has various outcomes. Usually Dolf's solutions do end up saving the day or at least help making otherwise dire situations less devastating, but I also appreciate that Dolf doesn't really shove away the children's religion in all this. While he never quite becomes religious himself by the end of the book, you can absolutely see how much newfound appreciation and respect he develops for the people he travels with, even if their beliefs don't align with his own. So while it's not a perfect balance (Dolf's situations usually make things better rather than just praying and waiting), it's still neat to see him grow as a person as a result of traveling with the children's crusade.
The twist near the end of the book (the entire crusade having been a hoax just to lure the children south to be sold as slaves) was also very devastating and honestly the impact of that moment when Dolf realizes where he's been helping lead the children too just hits so hard, an expertly executed scene and seeing Dolf and his friends come up with a last-minute solution (which might not even work if the others don't believe him) was just very nerve-racking. And Ansulmus' fate was so good. He deceived an army of eight thousand children in order to get some money, and now he gets literally torn apart to death by the few thousand that made it this far on the journey.
So, minus some points I've brought up above, I do genuinely think this is a great novel. It's adventurous, heartfelt, nerve-racking and even educational at times. I do recommend this one, but based on what I've read on the English translation I'm not sure if I can recommend that one in particular.
Rating: 3.75/5
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