The Tuckers: The Cottage Holiday, Jo Mendel
Dear America: Christmas After All, Kathryn Lasky
These are two of my yearly Christmas reads, and I've reviewed them so many times I'm loathe to repeat the reviews. You can search for the titles and review all the different things I've noted about them. They are both series books: one in a series about a family and one in a series of epistolary historical novels.
The Tuckers are a common series family: five kids, mom, dad, grandparents, the inevitable shaggy dog, and a cat. The kids occasionally quarrel, but are always ultimately kind to each other and other people. The vocabulary is simple, so this is safest for even younger children, although there is an incident involving an abandoned baby and a lost woman stalked by a cougar. The others in the series are alternately sweet or funny, but this one has a special touch to it as if the author was adding some depth to the character of Penny, who is pretty much just a sweet seven-year-old in the other volumes. Compared to her active brothers and sister, Penny is physically frail, and she hopes a Christmas trip to the family's lake home will help her find her own strengths. It's a wonderful snow romp with almost every Christmas dream you might have ever had as a kid: endless days playing in the snow, skating, cutting your own Christmas tree, lots of yummy food, and adventures with happy endings. The ending always brings a lump to my throat.
Christmas After All is a Christmas tale of a different sort: a family in 1932 Indianapolis having to tightening their belts as the effects of the Depression grow deeper. Youngest daughter and next-to-youngest child Minnie Swift narrates as the family closes off more rooms in their home to save coal, eats pretty-much-meatless meals as it's all they can afford, and notice that day by day their father comes home a little earlier until one day he doesn't go to work at all, as his company has gone out of business. Then a twist of fate sends them an orphaned cousin, Willie Faye Darling, who comes from a dust-bowl ravaged town in Texas. As Minnie and her science-geek little brother Ozzie and the rest of the family are awed by the different life Willie Faye has led, the Dust Bowl survivor also is fascinated with the chatty, diverse Swifts, who, like the Tuckers, rally around each other in times of need.
Yet it's quiet, artistic, humble Willie Faye that will prompt their inventiveness in a seemingly dark Christmas, and who will get the Swifts through their greatest family crisis. It's a dark story sometimes (something very upsetting happens to one of Minnie's friends, and then something shocking happens to the Swifts themselves), but also one full of hope. The one false note is the standard "Dear America" epilogue that strays into the realm of fantasy, and checks off every significant late 20th century historical event to involve the various members of the family with.
Otherwise, like Mary Poppins, practically perfect in every way.
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