From Publishers Weekly
Now with a new cover and new size (8 11/16" x 7 7/8"), The Christmas Miracle of Jonathan Toomey (1995) by Susan Wojciechowski, illus. by P.J. Lynch, pairs what PW's starred review called an "elegant, poignant" story, about the spiritual reawakening of a bitter man, with richly detailed watercolors of an early-American setting. Ages 6-12.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Ages 4^-9. "Christmas is pish-posh," grumbles Jonathan Toomey, the best wood carver in the valley. He's a Scroogelike recluse; but he's a gentle grouch, it turns out, and he hides a sad secret. He's transformed, not by Dickensian ghosts, but by an eager seven-year-old boy and his widowed mother who ask him to make them a Christmas creche. The story verges on the sentimental, but it's told with feeling and lyricism (he "traveled till his tears stopped" ). Lynch's sweeping illustrations, in shades of wood grain, are both realistic and gloriously romantic, focusing on faces and hands at work before the fire and in the lamplight. In a beautiful, elemental scene, the angry wood carver stands on the threshold of his home, disturbed by the gentle widow and her son who want his help and will transform his life.
Hazel Rochman
