Christmas Miracle Of Jonathan Toomey - Hardcover

Susan Wojciechowski, born in New York, was a children's librarian and schoolteacher for many years before becoming a successful author. Susan is best known for her first picture book, The Christmas Miracle of Jonathan Toomey, which won numerous honours including the prestigious Kate Greenaway Medal, and was adapted into a feature film. About her writing, Susan says, "As a mother, librarian, and former teacher as well as a children's author, I have always felt the need to touch the minds of children. Through my writing, I try to reach children in a special way, by portraying them as real people - warts and all - and showing them that they are more or less alike, despite their differences."P.J. Lynch has won many awards including the Mother Goose Award, the Christopher Medal three times, the Irish Bisto Book of the Year Award, and the prestigious Kate Greenaway Medal on two occasions - first for The Christmas Miracle of Jonathan Toomey by Susan Wojciechowski, and again for When Jessie Came Across the Sea by Amy Hest. In recent years, P.J. Lynch has been commissioned to design posters for Opera Ireland and the Abbey Theatre, as well as designing stamps for An Post. He lives in Dublin with his wife and their three children.

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