Lucy & Tom's Christmas (Picture Puffin S.)

Product Information

This wonderfully evocative Christmas book reminds me so vividly of my own childhood Christmases, with my mother making mince pies at the big wooden kitchen table and the Salvation Army playing Christmas carols. The page where we see the presents that Lucy and Tom have both bought for their families raised a particular chuckle of recognition. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. It's the first Christmas book I've ever read that showed the children "posting" their letters to Santa by burning them in the fireplace.

With each review, I provide a Cleanliness Report, mentioning any objectionable content I come across so that parents and/or conscientious readers (like me) can determine beforehand whether they want to read a book or not. I also love the English flavor of these books, fun to point out expressions like "cross" that may not be so familiar to American children. One of the loveliest things to do at Christmas is cuddle up and enjoy a good picture book together – and these classic stories have really stood the test of time. And be sure to check out my bio page to learn a little about me and the Picture Book/Chapter Book Calendars I sell on Etsy!Didn’t realize that until adulthood :) bought this book as soon as my daughter was born to read to her each Christmas season. She was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was the first recipient of BookTrust's Lifetime Achievement Award. Hughes is so prolific and I highly recommend seeking out her picture books- not always so easy to find on this side of the ocean. She won the Kate Greenaway Medal twice and was awarded the OBE for her distinguished service to children's literature. She wrote two novels for older children, Hero on a Bicycle , about a 13-year-old Italian boy during the occupation of Florence, and Whistling in the Dark , set during the Liverpool Blitz.

Shirley Hughes is the illustrator of more than two hundred children’s books and has won many prestigious awards, including the Kate Greenaway Medal twice. I grew up with Lucy and Tom in the late Seventies and early Eighties, so revisiting the book now feels rather like looking at my own childhood Christmases, laid out in lovely thick gouache.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. She also collaborated with her daughter, Clara Vulliamy, on the Dixie O'Day series; which saw Shirley with an illustrator for the first time with Shirley writing the text and Clara creating the illustrations. This wonderful heartwarming story was read to me as a child and brings back so many happy memories as I now have the privilege of reading it to my niece. Her first book - Lucy and Tom's Day - was published in 1960, and she followed it with, among others, Dogger, and the Alfie series. In 1930s Liverpool, young Bronwen and Dylan find kindness from an unexpected source when they are frightened by what they think is a ghost on Christmas Eve.

The illustrations are so detailed and the story is very cute with hilariously accurate depictions of children’s emotions. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Hughes has a lovely endearing style to her drawing - I will certainly be reading and collecting many other titles from her.

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