Review by New York Times Review
THE HOLIDAYS ARE so unpredictable. Some years you're stuck on an iceberg with your menorah; some years you're cowering in a muddy border trench facing German soldiers; and some years you're kidnapped by a vaguely demonic wooden horse named Trott-trott. You just never know. So it makes sense that three new holiday books offer very different perspectives on wintertime adventures. Twenty-five years after writing the best Hanukkah book of all time, "Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins" (I will throw a latke at anyone who disagrees), Eric A. Kimmel delivers "Simon and the Bear," a loony Hanukkah story about a Russian immigrant stranded by a shipwreck on an iceberg with a lady polar bear. Simon is frightened, but he shares his brown bread and herring. To his surprise, the bear brings him a raw salmon. ("Not bad!" Simon assesses. "A little salty. Like lox.") She keeps him warm. It happens to be Hanukkah, and they spend seven nights on the iceberg ... and then on the eighth day Simon gets a miracle. The illustrator Matthew Trueman's humans have blocky fingers, protruding ears and round noses (I flashed back to the early 1960s Muggins Mouse books in my Bubbe's house), while the bear and backgrounds are luminous, majestic and painterly. It's a lot of fun. John Hendrix's "Shooting at the Stars" is visually and tonally very different. A picture book aimed at an 8-to-12-year-old audience (I kept wishing it were a graphic novel, which might be an easier sell to "reluctant readers" who would gravitate to the subject), it's a fictionalized version of a true incident from 1914. German and British foot soldiers in their trenches all lay down their arms for Christmas, shook hands, sang carols, played football with an empty biscuit tin, and hung tiny trees with lanterns and candles. The art is a fascinating mix of cartoonish (our hero Charlie's sweet, open, Archie-like face) and cinematic (close-ups of feet and long shots of soldiers waving across the distance). It's also a bit scary, depicting dead bodies in the no man's land between the trenches. Handlettering is mixed with blocks of text, all in a beautiful palette of blues and greens for peaceful nighttime scenes, along with reds, browns and oranges for harsh daylight. It's an ambitious and nuanced book, one that adults will need to talk about with kids. It's an antiwar story that doesn't demonize soldiers; it's a response to people who see religion as a divisive force; it's an opportunity to explain the challenges of historical fiction. Alas, the dense two-page foreword is a drudgy history lesson; the author's note and glossary at the end are more useful and more kid-friendly. What to say about "A Treasury of Wintertime Tales," 13 stories originally published between 1905 and 1972 and collected in a ravishing, oversize hardcover by the art book publisher Taschen? The retro art is megawatt, featuring lots of Caldecott-winning illustrators. Hipster parents will want to get tattoos of every image. Mike D could wallpaper his Brooklyn townhouse with the pages. There's the super-mod citron-and-black pattern-upon-pattern look of Beatrice Braun-Fock's art in "Winter and the Children" (1959); Nicolas Sidjakov's bold slashes of black over blocks and triangles of hot pink, orange and avocado green stripes in "The Friendly Beasts" (1957); the angelic apple-cheeked Kewpie-esque babies of Sibylle von Olfers's 1905 "Marilyn and the Snow Children." The stories are a mix too: Some are boring and virtuous; some are lilting poems; some are inexplicably, delightfully, old-school nutballs ("Peter's mother said that the police really did not know how to look for little children," which is totally what I would say if my child disappeared for a few weeks on a magical oversize toy horse named Trott-trott). Yet the inclusion of Ingri and Edgar Parin d'Aulaire's "Children of the Northlights" (1935) is troubling. It's a romanticized, well-meaning portrayal of the indigenous Sami people of Scandinavia. But it refers to them throughout as Lapps, a term the Sami themselves consider derogatory. The tone is infantilizing ("The Lapps were great bear-hunters and were famous all over the world as wizards, but they were afraid of the school") and condescending (the Lapp children have to be taught to sit properly instead of squatting; the Lapp grown-ups all drive too fast so the babies fall off the sleds). The book's editor, Noel Daniel, does call the characters Sami in the table of contents and back matter, but nowhere does she say that the word Lapp is hurtful and the people's depiction exoticizing. Look, we all loved the d'Aulaires' Greek myths books as kids, and these illustrations are just as gorgeous. But here the d'Aulaires are talking about real people, people who have been hurt by Nordic colonialism. Meanwhile, the story about Chinese-Americans in Los Angeles is told by a white dude; and while Daniel notes the diverse ethnic backgrounds of the authors and illustrators, some readers are bound to wonder how many of the 20 in the collection might be anything other than white.... Well, I wish the book had at least discussed the downside of reissuing vintage kid lit. And frankly, I found myself thinking, c'mon, throw me a Hanukkah bone! Suddenly I was a small child in Rhode Island in December again, feeling isolated in majority culture. And there's an out-of-print K'ton Ton Hanukkah story, so don't give me any geschrei, Taschen. MARJORIE INGALL is a life and religion columnist for Tablet magazine.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [November 30, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* During the trench warfare in northern France in WWI, enemies were often separated by less than 100 feet. On Christmas Eve in the bitter winter of 1914, a virtual miracle occurred. Enemies on both sides stopped fighting and began to sing Silent Night while brightly lit Christmas trees dotted the tops of the trenches. On Christmas Day, enemy soldiers walked into the open ground between the trenches and shook hands. They buried their dead, and then the soldiers took photos of each other and exchanged biscuits and buttons and belts from their uniforms as souvenirs. Although the text is fictionalized and written as a poignant letter from a soldier, the author's note explains the incident is well documented from letters and interviews. Illustrations in graphite, fluid acrylic washes, and gouache capture well the unlikely events and bring humanity to individual soldiers' faces. Vivid details of the trenches protected by barbed wire and the soldiers' uniforms alternate with the desolate landscape of mud, snow, and battered tree stumps. Meanwhile, glowing stars and sunlit skies look on impersonally on the day war took a holiday. --Gepson, Lolly Copyright 2014 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Inspired by the uplifting true story of German, French and English soldiers who fashioned an unofficial truce on Christmas Day, Hendrix crafts an intimate fictional account of the event, framed as a young British soldier's letter to his mother. In hand-lettered text and a simply drawn map, Charlie describes the brutal conditions of fighting and living in the trenches during a cold, wet winter on the French-Belgian border. But gloom gives way to joy, astonishment, and hope as he witnesses enemies put aside their differences and celebrate their commonality. A scene of miniature candlelit Christmas trees aglow above the German trench, as the lyrics to "Silent Night" float across the page, is just one of several powerful images. An author's note, glossary, and bibliography may serve as jumping off points for budding history buffs. Ages 8-12. Agent: Rebecca Sherman, Writers House. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by School Library Journal Review
Gr 3-5-A two-page explanation of the Christmas Day truce of 1914 precedes the fictionalized account of this unusual occasion. In a letter to his mother, a young English soldier describes the events of that unique day when, at the invitation of a German officer, the English Doughboys left their trenches and met their enemies in No Man's Land. The young man describes how they helped one another bury the dead; traded personal items such as hats, buttons, and buckles; shared their rations, and played football (soccer) with a biscuit tin. The day ends with the soldiers returning to their respective trenches. An angry English major soon appears on the scene, accusing his troops of being traitors. The book's title comes from the narrator's knowledge that his side will soon be ordered to fire on their new friends, but he figures that they will be shooting upward at the stars, rather than across at the Germans. The illustrations, in graphite, fluid acrylic washes, and gouache in dark blues, greens, oranges, and yellows are a perfect fit for the narrative. Most of the text appears in a typical serif font, but parts appear as a hand-printed letter. The title concludes with a well-written author's note. Few titles at this level convey the futility of World War I as well as this one does. A first choice.-Eldon Younce, Anthony Public Library, KS (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Horn Book Review
Hendrix distills the now practically mythic story of the 1914 Christmas Truce into the fictional experience of one young English soldier writing to his mother from a trench in France. A brief introduction and an appended author's note provide context, but the focus here is very much on young Charlie and his unlikely day of fellowship with his German adversaries: "Mother, it was such a beautiful day." Hendrix's Charlie is a ruddy-cheeked Everyboy who provides a sympathetic focus for the paintings of a desolate landscape of mud and barbed wire; while not shying away from war's grim realities, the pictures go a long way toward conveying the hopeful light of Christmas, with trees twinkling in the night while the strains of "Stille Nacht" waft across No Man's Land toward our homesick hero. roger sutton (c) Copyright 2014. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A fictionalized accountbased on letters from and interviews with actual soldiersof the holiday cease-fire during World War I. In epistolary design, Charlie, a young British soldier, writes home from his trench to tell his mother of an extraordinary event that happened that day. After months of fighting, Christmas Eve did not seem like an occasion for joy. But shockingly, German soldiers, only a few paces away in their own muddy trenches, lit tiny Christmas trees and sang "Silent Night" as loud as they could. The next morning, all soldiers came together on the battlefield to celebrate. Some also shared a deep connection while burying their fallen comrades. The truce didn't last, but its power has resonated for decades. As Hendrix states simply in his author's note: "The story of the Christmas Truce is not about politics, but people." Told from Charlie's perspective, occasionally in handwritten lettering, the story's immensity and emotion is palpable. Cold, blue-tinted acrylic washes warm to golden oranges and yellows as the soldiers unite. One soldier's weary reflection, surely echoing that of many others, stretches out across the page: "Why can't we just go homeand have peace?" Timed with the centenary of World War I but a lesson for always, Hendrix's tale pulls young readers close and shows the human side of war. (introduction, glossary, bibliography, index) (Picture book. 7-12) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
