The Singing Hill

Meindert DeJong’s The Singing Hill (1962) is not a book I had heard of. But I’ve read The Wheel on the School and loved it, so when I saw this on the library shelf I picked it up. I wondered: would it make a good read-aloud for us?

The main character is a little boy named Ray, whose family has just moved to a house surrounded by cornfields in the country. Ray has been kept home from school for one more year as the family adjusts to their new locale. Spurned by his older brother and sister for being too young, and finding himself with long spells of solitude in a landscape full of unknown and imagined perils, Ray stumbles upon an old horse on a hilltop. He befriends the horse whose fenced pasture is like the tip of a green wave in the rolling sea of cornfields. But when the rainy season comes, and the horse is left exposed in the wind and rain, Ray reaches beyond his fear toward gallantry.

More about his inner enlightenment than outward action, this story makes us know and feel Ray’s seeming aloneness and fearfulness, and the different ways he handles these things. Through the narrative with its innocent perspective and simple sentence construction, we are drawn very gently into a sustained experience of a young child’s thought processes. With a daughter right around Ray’s age myself, I felt very grateful for this reminder of who children are in themselves — from the inside looking out, so to speak.

Like The Wheel on the School, The Singing Hill — a title taken from a Bible passage Ray’s mother quotes — is a story about something going right with the world. Even a child like Ray has learned enough to know that it’s generally safe to expect things to go wrong. But he risks his everything in the hope that he can change one small part of the world for the good. What puts this among the best and most powerful stories is that he turns out to be right.