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United States Children’s Books: The Clock Strikes at Midnight
- Biography
A young girl wakes in the night to see the walls of her room “pulsing with a strange, glimmering light.” Thus begins “Where Snow Angels Go,” a captivating illustrated story by Maggie O’Farrell, author of the prize-winning 2020 novel “Hamnet.”
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Where Snow Angels Go
By Maggie O'Farrell
Candlewick
72 pages
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The girl is Sylvie, and to her mingled alarm and joy she sees that she has an extraordinary visitor—a silvery blue angel, born of a playful moment when she had thrashed her arms and legs in fresh powder, as children do. Illustrator Daniela Jaglenka Terrazzini portrays him as a Renaissance youth with a bold jaw, curling hair, and graceful, luxuriant wings. “When he moved,” Ms. O’Farrell writes, “tiny showers of luminous dust came off him, like snow falling from a branch.”
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The angel has come because the girl is in danger. Thanks to him, Sylvie’s mother too wakens and discovers that her daughter is running a fever. “Sylvie was ill for a long time,” we read. “She was still in bed, most unfortunately, on Christmas Day.” Once recovered, the child yearns to see her Snow Angel again. Since he must come if she’s in peril, she decides to take reckless measures—climbing too high, walking down stairs with her eyes closed—but no guardian appears. Only when she nearly drowns does she understand, from the sharp cold of the wave that saves her, that the angel still extends his protection. This realization inspires her to ask a great favor on behalf of the people she loves most in this hopeful story for children ages 6-10.
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Advent: Festive German Bakes to Celebrate the Coming of Christmas
By Anja Dunk
Hardie Grant Publishing
272 pages
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This weekend marks the beginning of Advent, the period of Christian preparation that culminates in the celebration of Christmas. From the European culture that gave the world the Christmas tree comes “Advent: Festive German Bakes to Celebrate the Coming of Christmas,” an elegant cookbook created by food writer and artist Anja Dunk. “Much of the baking of Adventsgebäck is done together as a family,” she writes. “It’s a messy affair with icing sugar flying through the air, sprinkles and silver balls skittling around the table, and, as you can imagine, much excitement.”
Ms. Dunk’s atmospheric photographs and linocut illustrations serve to showcase her recipes for Yuletide delicacies that many of us might ordinarily buy ready-made. These include Lebkuchen, the classic German spiced cookies, and Stollen, the sugar-dusted, marzipan-filled Christmas loaf, but also the savory cheese and poppy-seed rolls known as Käsebrötchen and the pizza-like Flammkuchen. Traditional German baking calls for ingredients that American home cooks may not have on hand, such as beet-sugar syrup and “baker’s ammonia,” but Ms. Dunk suggests substitutions. She also, another mercy, gives measurements in both metric and imperial.
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The First Christmas
By Phillips Brooks and Lewis H. Redner; Illustrated by Will Moses
Simon & Schuster/Paula Wiseman Books
35 pages
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The words for “O Little Town of Bethlehem” came in 1867 from the pen of Phillips Brooks, rector of the Episcopal Church of the Holy Trinity in Philadelphia. A year later it was set to music and entered the American choral canon. Now the familiar first stanza—which begins, “O little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie!”—provides the text for “The First Christmas.” The illustrations in this picture book are painted by Will Moses, great-grandson of Anna Mary Robertson “Grandma” Moses, the self-taught artist who didn’t put brush to canvas until she was 77. Unlike his famous forebear, whose pictures have a flat, naive quality, Mr. Moses brings proportion and detail to his folk-art depictions of the Nativity. He paints tiny figures on camels in the distance, realistic animals in the foreground, and haloed angels on high. This tender book radiates peace, as well it might.
Christmas Eve, “the night for miracles and lost causes,” is anything but tranquil in J.K. Rowling’s novel “The Christmas Pig,” a fantasy adventure for children ages 8-12. The book tells of a boy’s Dantean quest to find his beloved stuffed animal, a plush pig called DP. In pursuit of his childhood companion, Jack becomes the first living child ever to descend from the Land of the Living, where we are, to the Land of the Lost. This strange and often hostile realm is where all the things that people lose—ornaments, asthma inhalers, bad habits—go to be sorted according to how much they are missed. Some fortunate objects get to go to the city of Mislaid, for instance, and their stay is temporary. But others—the wrecked, discarded and forgotten—face a terrible exile in the Wastes of the Unlamented.
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The Christmas Pig
By J.K. Rowling
Scholastic
285 pages
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Jack’s guide on his journey is a stuffed pig identical to the one he’s lost, an unwanted new toy that he derisively calls the Christmas Pig. As the two race against time—the rescue must happen before the stroke of midnight, but where is DP?—they find themselves contending with unfriendly Loss Adjusters and a voracious monster known as The Loser. Jim Field’s exuberant black-and-white illustrations fit the cinematic feel of the story so well that they might be studies for a future movie.
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Jan Brett’s The Nutcracker
By Jan Brett
G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers
32 pages
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A clock striking midnight is the charm that sets in motion the magical transformations of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s story of a young girl and an enchanted nutcracker. This Christmas stalwart gets the Jan Brett treatment in “Jan Brett’s The Nutcracker,” a beguiling picture book for children ages 4-8. The style of Ms. Brett’s illustration (see above) is as distinctive as the star on a Christmas tree: In her pictures, the principal visual storyline comes wreathed in smaller pictures that convey sweet scenes of simultaneous action and glimpses of what’s to come. Here, as Marie and her brother Fritz revel with guests at the sumptuous Christmas party that opens the story, animals with beautiful clothes and instruments seem to be providing the music. Ms. Brett has chosen a snowy 19th-century Russian setting for her version of the story, with bears in embroidered blouses that dance the Russian Trepak and flying squirrels that serve tea from a samovar to Marie and her Nutcracker consort.
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Red and Green and Blue and White
By Lee Wind, illustrated by Paul O. Zelinsky
Levine Querido
28 pages
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The spirit of seasonal goodwill prevails in a picture-book account of an incident that took place in Montana in 1993. In “Red and Green and Blue and White,” Lee Wind tells of two children, one Jewish and the other Catholic. “Isaac helped his family decorate their big window for Chanukah,” we read. “Across the street, his best friend Teresa helped her family trim their Christmas tree.” One night, as Paul O. Zelinsky shows in his affecting illustrations, a shadowy assailant approaches the Jewish household: “SMASH! The window shattered. A stone! Shards of glass falling. And Isaac, wide awake, watched their menorah flicker out.” The next night, Isaac’s family lights their menorah again, and this time it is joined by one that Teresa has drawn and taped up inside her front window. Soon other neighbors put up pictures of menorahs, too: “Local stores joined in. And restaurants. And clubs. It was on TV, and in the newspaper.” This moving tribute to religious pluralism will uplift children ages 4-7 yet cannot but make them a little somber, too.
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Happy Llamakkah!
By Laura Gehl, illustrated by Lydia Nichols
Abrams Appleseed
24 pages
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There’s not a note of solemnity in Laura Gehl’s light, irreverent picture book for 2- to 4-year-olds, “Happy Llamakkah!” The book came out last year but, like so many 2020 books, may have been missed in the Covid shuffle. Lydia Nichols’s pictures are cheerful and uncomplicated as a family of long-necked quadrupeds celebrates the miracle of the Maccabees by lighting candles, playing games and eating yummy foods: “Singing so sweet. / Donuts to eat. / Gelt for a treat. / HAPPY LLAMAKKAH!”
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Appeared in the November 27, 2021, print edition as 'The Clock Strikes at Midnight.'
