Thibault Busschots's Reviews > Koning van Katoren

A Dutch classic and a mandatory read when I was in school.


After the king died, six ministers took over the country and didn’t appoint a new king. It’s 17 years later and the ministers are still not looking for a new king because they quite like their new positions of power. But the country’s suffering under their rule. When a young boy asks them what someone needs to do to become king, they give him seven impossible missions. With his kind and friendly nature and quick thinking, the young boy attempts to successfully finish each and every one of his missions and become the new king.


The missions are not only really clever but they’re also quite relevant to problems our society still faces. Like in the first mission - the birds of decibel - where people all constantly wear earflaps to protect their ears from the bird noise. This is about people not listening to each other anymore. It’s about the importance of actually listening to other people when you’re talking to each other, as it can lead to new perspectives and revelations.


Or in the second mission where the protagonist has to cut down a grenade tree. The grenades grow on the tree because of the many gunpowder factories in the town. The reason there are so many gunpowder factories is because of an arms race. They’re basically making more weapons than they could possibly carry, just to be ready for the eventuality of a possible war in the future.


I could go on but simply put, all of these missions revolve around problems in different towns and the people there don’t even realize they’re the cause of their own problems. And this imaginative and clever story tackles quite a lot of important and relevant man-made problems like pollution and corruption.