Quite possibly the best Christmas book I've ever read.
I've been reading them since the 1960s, when my favorite was Frances Frost's Sleigh Bells for Windy Foot from the school library. The story doesn't necessarily need to involve magic, like The Legend of Holly Claus; even more I like stories of regular families having a warm holiday season: The Tuckers: Cottage Holiday is a prime example. The new Callahan Cousins book is pretty good in that department, but it can't compare to the three examples above, or A Christmas Carol, or Christmas After All.
The "Dear America" books are something I can take or leave. I got a couple with good coupons and the rest on the remainder shelf. My Secret War was pretty good, as was When Christmas Comes Again (not really a Christmas book, but about the "Hello girls" in World War I), and the story of the Italian girl crossing the great plains. The Titanic book was average and the Pearl Harbor book was pretty bad. I've heard some pretty scathing criticisms about the two books involving Native American characters.
But in Christmas After All, Kathryn Lasky has created a masterpiece within the diary format of the books.
It is the story of Minnie Swift, youngest of four sisters, her precocious genius younger brother Ozzie, and her parents during the days of the Great Depression. Dad's job is going badly and the family is reduced to shutting down rooms in their home to cut down on coal bills. They rarely have meat for supper, but eat a succession of aspics and "O'Grotons," as Minnie calls them.
Then, as December begins, Willie Faye Darling comes into their life. Willie Faye is the only daughter of cousins of Minnie's mother. Her parents, from a small town called Heart's Bend, Texas, have died after losing a battle with life in the Dust Bowl. Willie Faye is Minnie's age (11), but looks two years younger due to malnutrition and hardships. She arrives at the Swift home covered in dust and with a kitten named Tumbleweed whose nose she had to suction out morning, noon and night to keep him from smothering. Willie Faye has never seen an indoor bathroom, gone to a movie, read a Buck Rogers comic, or listened to the radio, so Minnie thinks that Willie Faye will have a lot to learn from them.
She never dreams what she—and the entire family—will learn from the fragile-looking but tough little girl from the Dust Bowl when the ravages of the Depression begin leaching away the family's security.
I have many of Lasky's other books and love them as well (the only series of hers I couldn't get into was the Starbuck family books), including Prank, which takes place in East Boston, and her adult mysteries starring Calista Jacobs. But Christmas After All has a special magic to it, perhaps because it is based on Lasky's mother's experiences as well as her own and the characters ring true.
Christmas After All is highly recommended.
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