Autumn customarily brings an onslaught of sparkle-bound holiday books destined for children everywhere. Many are craftily created to counterbalance our culture’s increasingly aggressive consumer marketing, by reminding young people of the spirit and meaning of Christmas and showing the season in a gentler light. Though both of these seasonal offerings are a cut above the avalanche of cheap display fodder, they are for decidedly different audiences.
   

In A Star for Christmas, Trisha Romance, the resident master of nostalgic art in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, offers a Christian tale of an adopted reindeer and a carpenter who so loves his rural
kinfolk that he painstakingly crafts a Christmas surprise for them: a life-size nativity scene in the woods. The story is told with near-Biblical simplicity, without humour or detail in the narrative. Instead, events unfold through soft, impressionistic prose in the style of the beautiful watercolours on which Romance has built her prolific, very successful artistic career.

This book is sure to find its way under countless trees this season. It should be noted, however, that Romance’s first children’s book reads like something deliberately conceived and packaged to appeal to parents looking for a new holiday classic. Though it’s beautifully rendered and plays on the senses like high-end potpourri, the book may appeal more to older readers and gift-givers who long to pass on the magic and warmth of Christmas as it should have been, rather than how it ever was. In spite of the characteristic richness and generosity of the watercolour pictures, there is little meat in the narrative to hook a child, and gauzy loveliness alone does not a holiday classic make.