Sebastián Ortega began The Wheel on the School on a Tuesday in late October, in his fourth-grade classroom at Mathews Elementary in Austin. He finished it on a Friday in early December, in the same chair, near the same window.
The book is by Meindert DeJong, with illustrations by Maurice Sendak. It was published in 1954 and won the Newbery in 1955. It is 298 pages long, and it is about six Dutch schoolchildren who want to bring storks back to their village.
Sebastián is nine. He is a slow reader by the metric the school district uses, which is words per minute on a timed passage. He is a deep reader by every metric that matters, including the one that asks whether a book has changed how a child looks at the street on the walk home.
His teacher, Mrs. Reyes, did not assign the book. He chose it himself from the long shelf of older Newberys in the back of the room, which Mrs. Reyes has kept since she started teaching in 2011.
He chose it because the cover had a wheel on it and he wanted to know why. The reason for the wheel does not appear until page sixty-two.
For the first two weeks, Sebastián read at school and did not finish a chapter a day. He carried the book home in his backpack only twice. The book lived in his desk.
Mrs. Reyes noticed. She did not comment. She has been teaching long enough to know that a slow reader's deep book is not a problem to be solved but a process to be left alone.
By the third week, Sebastián was reading the book at recess. He sat on the bench under the live oak in the south corner of the playground and read while the other children played four-square.
He was not antisocial. He played four-square some days too. But the book had begun to do its slow work, and the work happens at the speed it happens, and the playground is as good a place as any for it.
In the fourth week, he started talking about Lina at home. Lina is the only girl in the school in the book. Sebastián's older sister, Camila, who is twelve, asked who Lina was. Sebastián explained for nine minutes without stopping.
His mother, who teaches reading recovery at a different school, wrote down four sentences from Sebastián's explanation in a small notebook she keeps on the kitchen counter. The notebook is the size of a hand. She has been keeping it for both children since they were born.
The fifth week brought the storm chapter. In the book, the children are looking for a wagon wheel in a coming gale on the dike. Sebastián read those chapters in two long sessions, once at school and once at home in his bed before lights-out.
He came down the next morning and told his mother, before breakfast, that he had been worried about Jella. Jella is a boy in the book. Sebastián's mother said: I know him. He is going to be all right. Sebastián said: I know. But I was worried.
The sixth week was the ending. Sebastián read the last sixty pages in three days. He read more at home than at school. Mrs. Reyes noted that the book had migrated from the desk to the backpack and stayed there.
When he finished the book, on a Friday in early December, he came to Mrs. Reyes's desk after the bell. He held the book out. He said: The storks came. Mrs. Reyes said: I know. Did you like it? He said: I do not know yet.
He took the book home that weekend even though he had finished it. His mother saw it on his bedside table on Monday morning. It stayed there for two more weeks. He did not reread it. He just had it nearby.
What a long book does for a nine-year-old who reads slowly is a different thing from what it does for a fast reader. The book becomes part of the season. The six Dutch children become roughly as real, in his mind, as the children at the table behind him in the cafeteria.
Sebastián's mother asked, in late January, what he had loved about the book. He said: The waiting. They waited a long time for the storks. And then the storks came.
The fourth-grade classroom at Mathews Elementary has thirty-one children in it this year. Most of them have read seven or eight chapter books by December. Sebastián has read three. The Wheel on the School is one of them.
If the school district's metric is the metric, Sebastián is behind. If the metric is whether a book has done the work a book is for, he is not behind. He is, if anything, a long way ahead.
What the year will hold, in books, has not been decided. Mrs. Reyes thinks he may try the Wilder next, the long one with the snow. His mother thinks he may go back to the DeJong.
Sebastián has not said. He is, at the moment of this writing, halfway through a much shorter book about a boy and a falcon. He is reading it at recess, under the same live oak, at his own pace, which is the only pace that has ever been his.
