Christmas is pish-posh, grumbles Jonathan Toomey, the best wood carver in the valley. He's a Scroogelike recluse; but he's a gentle grouch, it turns out, and he hides a sad secret. He's transformed, not by Dickensian ghosts, but by an eager seven-year-old boy and his widowed mother who ask him to make them a Christmas creche. The story verges on the sentimental, but it's told with feeling and lyricism (he traveled till his tears stopped ). Lynch's sweeping illustrations, in shades of wood grain, are both realistic and gloriously romantic, focusing on faces and hands at work before the fire and in the lamplight. In a beautiful, elemental scene, the angry wood carver stands on the threshold of his home, disturbed by the gentle widow and her son who want his help and will transform his life. (Reviewed Sept. 15, 1995)

Withdrawn since the death of his wife and child, Jonathan Toomey is known by the village children as 'Mr. Gloomy.' He gradually emerges from his self-imposed solitude when the widow McDowell and her son engage his services as a master woodcarver to re-create their lost Christmas crèche. Realistic, well-crafted watercolors add detail to the wintry nineteenth-century small-town setting, complementing the emotion of the text.

Now with a new cover and new size (8 11/16"""" x 7 7/8""""), The Christmas Miracle of Jonathan Toomey (1995) by Susan Wojciechowski, illus. by P.J. Lynch, pairs what PW's starred review called an """"elegant, poignant"""" story, about the spiritual reawakening of a bitter man, with richly detailed watercolors of an early-American setting.