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    One Christmas Wish
    One Christmas Wish
    One Christmas Wish
    Ebook45 pages18 minutes

    One Christmas Wish

    By Katherine Rundell and Emily Sutton

    3/5

    ()

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    About this ebook

    From beloved author Katherine Rundell comes a clever, funny, and poignant picture book about a lonely little boy who wishes not to be alone on Christmas.

    A young boy’s Christmas Eve wish on a shooting star leads to an adventure with an ever-hungry rocking horse, an angel whose wings are molting, a robin who has forgotten how to sing, and a rusting tin drummer boy in Katherine Rundell’s classic Christmas story, with Emily Sutton’s gorgeous paintings.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
    Release dateSep 18, 2018
    ISBN9781481491624
    One Christmas Wish
    Author

    Katherine Rundell

    Katherine Rundell is the author of Rooftoppers, Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms (a Boston Globe–Horn Book Award winner), The Wolf Wilder, The Explorer, The Good Thieves, and The Zebra’s Great Escape. She grew up in Zimbabwe, Brussels, and London, and is currently a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. She begins each day with a cartwheel and believes that reading is almost exactly the same as cartwheeling: it turns the world upside down and leaves you breathless. In her spare time, she enjoys walking on tightropes and trespassing on the rooftops of Oxford colleges.

    Read more from Katherine Rundell

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    Reviews for One Christmas Wish

    3/5

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    • 3/5
      Left alone on Christmas Eve night by his parents, both of whom must work, young Theodore attempts to decorate the family tree himself, digging out an old box full of broken ornaments. After putting up an angel with molting wings, a rocking horse with woodworm-eaten rockers, a tin soldier with a rusted drum, and a partially bald robin, he makes a wish on a shooting star, asking for some company. Suddenly he finds that the four decorations he has just put on the tree have come to life, and stand ready to accompany him on a magical Christmas adventure. From finding singing lessons for the robin to making new wings for the angel, from seeking out the tin soldier's true love to attempting to keep the hungry horse fed, everything they do seems designed to deprive Theo of these new companions, and leave him alone again. But behind it all is a greater purpose, and the magic unleashed brings him the best thing of all...Although Katherine Rundell's One Christmas Wish is formatted rather like a picture-book, I think it is more like a heavily illustrated short story, in book format. I expected, given the description and the appealing cover artwork, to find it enchanting - a magical Christmas adventure, just as billed. Unfortunately, although I did find Rundell's narrative moderately engaging, it didn't touch my emotions or fire my imagination to quite the degree that I had hoped. Something about the premise just put me off, and I found the whole story rather disjointed. I couldn't quite understand why Theo's parents seemed so uncaring at first, until the 'miracle' of the horse reminded them to come home. Were we somehow meant to assume they'd forgotten the spirit of Christmas? Do parents often leave their children at home on Christmas Eve with a babysitter, when it isn't (or doesn't seem like) an economic necessity for them to be working that night? While the story left me with mixed feelings, the artwork immediately won me over. Emily Sutton, who also illustrated the recently published The Christmas Eve Tree by Delia Huddy, contributes some lovely visuals here, and the two-page spreads alternate between text-dominated ones with a few peripheral illustrations, and image-dominated ones, in which a full or almost-full-page illustration is paired with a page of text. There are also some two-page spreads that are entirely devoted to the artwork, and contain no text. The color scheme is muted but deep, and I particularly loved the composition of the larger panels. Based on story alone, this probably would have been a two or two-and-a-half-star title for me, but the artwork definitely bumped it up a notch. Recommended primarily to Emily Sutton fans.

    Book preview

    One Christmas Wish - Katherine Rundell

    t was Christmas Eve, and Theodore was fighting a cardboard box. The box was winning. Someone had been very enthusiastic in their use of packing tape. Someone had thought it was important that the box stayed safe.

    The tissue paper was as old as the decorations themselves; it smelled of spices, and old perfume. Most of the decorations were baubles, and most of the baubles had cracked in half. Theo frowned as he took them out. You should not be able to cut yourself on Christmas, he muttered. That’s not in any of the Christmas carols.

    But at the bottom of the box there were four decorations that were different: a rocking horse, a robin, a tin soldier with a drum, and an angel. The angel’s wings were molting, and the soldier’s drum had rusted. The robin had developed a bald patch, and the rocking horse’s rockers had been partly eaten by woodworm.

    Theo hung them on the tree, next to the lights that didn’t light. He wasn’t tall enough to reach the high branches, so he tried throwing the angel at the top of the tree. When that didn’t work, he wedged her in the branches. He arranged the broken baubles as best he could.

    Theo had found the box of decorations on top of a cupboard; his parents had had no time to buy new decorations.

    They had had no time to buy a turkey. Both of them were at

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