The Christmas Miracle of Jonathan Toomey - Softcover

Susan Wojciechowski worked as a school librarian until recently. The Miracle of Jonathan Toomey was her first picture book. She lives near New York with her husband and children. P.J. Lynch won the 1987 Mother Goose Award for his first illustrated book, Alan Garner's A Bag of Moonshine. He has been shortlisted four times for the highest award in children's book illustration, the Kate Greenaway Medal, and twice won the award; for The Christmas Miracle of Jonathan Toomey in 1996 and in 1998 for When Jessie Came Across the Sea. His other titles include East O' the Sun and West O' the Moon; Catkin, which also won the illustrator category of the Bisto Irish Children's Book Award; and Grandad's Prayers of the Earth. He lives in Dublin. James Earl Jones is an Academy Award-nominated actor of stage and screen. He has appeared in more than fifty films, including Field of Dreams, and his commanding voice has animated Darth Vader in Star Wars and King Mufasa in The Lion King.

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