One Christmas Wish

By Katherine Rundell and Emily Sutton

Go on an adventure with Katherine Rundell ...
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NOMINATED FOR THE CILIP CARNEGIE MEDAL
NOMINATED FOR THE CILIP GREENAWAY MEDAL
From the winner of the Costa Children's Book Award
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'A writer with an utterly distinctive voice and a wild imagination' – Philip Pullman
'A book that will be treasured forever' - Irish Times
'A moving, witty and magical tale' - Sunday Times
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It's Christmas Eve and Theo – left at home with a babysitter – sees an odd-looking star out of his window and decides to make a wish. He wishes that he had some friends to keep him company. Moments later the Christmas decorations begin to disentangle themselves from the tree behind him, ready to wreak a little havoc...

Written with generous helpings of warmth and humour, this is a timeless Christmas story about treasuring the people and values that really matter at this time of year. With breathtaking illustrations by Emily Sutton capturing the magic of the season in stunning detail, this modern classic from master storyteller and bestselling children's author Katherine Rundell makes the perfect Christmas gift.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Oct 5, 2017
• ISBN: 9781408885727

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.

Reviews for One Christmas Wish

[abigailadams26 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

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.