• 08 Dec, 2025 *

What’s this? A Dutch children’s book from 1999?! Yes, it is, I randomly reread it after being reminded of it. I’ll spoil everything, I assume you won’t mind. The title translates into "how do I survive the year 2000?".

Remember the millennium bug? I was 7 or 8 years old when this book came out. A friend of mine received it as a present and read it, freaked out, gave it to me and then I read it and freaked out. The book is meant for children aged 10-12, but I don’t know if even that was the smartest move.

I didn’t understand much of the Y2K problem, but I did hear the adults around me talking. Would everything go wrong? Would electricity stop? Would we be doomed? At school, teachers taught us that things would mostly be fine, but maybe electricity would stop for a few hours. If you’d look outside, maybe the street lights would go a little haywire. No biggie, they said, with stressed out faces, eyes full of fear and a big fake smile underneath. Anything strange would last a day at most! We children were all starting to freak out a little.

Enter this popular children’s book. It’s about two kids on a farm. When midnight hits, the Y2K bug actually happens in the most dramatic way possible. Running water stops, electricity ends, phones are dead, the local factory explodes and poison fills the air. Within a few days, people from the city arrive and start looting and killing because food has run out everywhere.

Furthermore: the dog breaks his leg, one of the kids almost bleeds out after an injury, the neighbor dies, several rabbits get killed for food - yes, all in 130 pages. What the hell? No wonder this book scared me, haha!

After about ten days of this, they fix the bug and order gets restored. Hurrah, happy end. Except for China and Russia, we suddenly read on the last page. They got annihilated by exploding nuclear reactors on the first of January. Uhm?!

To every other person who read scary books about the millennium bug going wrong as a kid in 1999 unsupervised and as a result was terrified, I salute you.

#Dutch #Netherlands [#middle grade](https://readingrecluse.bearblog.dev/reviews/?q=middle grade) #review