Read De verdwijn-machine in Dutchwith every sentence explained

De verdwijn-machine by Kees Valkenstein was first published in 1917. In Passage you read the full text in the original Dutch, marked beginner and filed under children, mystery and crime and science fiction. It runs to about 55,800 words.

Touch the red knob and — gone! A summer holiday, a mysterious box and a whole village turned upside down.

Fifteen-year-old Koen Bruggemans is spending the summer with his parents and his sister Berte on a farm in the Veluwe, roaming the woods with Piet, the farmer's son. One day, sitting perfectly still to watch the deer, he spots a leather case hidden under the bushes. Inside are a locked wooden box, a key and papers in English. Koen's school English is just good enough for the title: a vanishing machine.

Touch the red knob to something and, after a while, it turns invisible: still there, still solid, just impossible to see. A key, a stick, Piet's cap, the farmer's white rooster... Soon the farmhouse is in uproar, the village constable and the mayor get involved, and the machine itself disappears. Somewhere, an American professor called Wells wants his invention back.

Funny and fast-moving, The Vanishing Machine (1917) is one of the very first Dutch science-fiction stories for young readers.

Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in Dutch. Read at your own pace, and when a sentence stops you, tap it. You get:

• a natural translation of that exact sentence,
• a short note on the grammar, in plain words,
• the key words, which you can save with the sentence they came from,
• all of it in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Turkish or Portuguese, whichever you read best.

It's marked beginner, so it's a good first whole book if you know the basics of Dutch and want something you can finish. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.