The voice

If you have read A Child's Christmas in Wales, you know that it has to be a classic. But you can't fully appreciate it until you have heard Dylan Thomas read it. What a deep, expressive, poetic voice. For years, I have listened to the recording on a Caedman record. It is wonderful to have it on a CD.

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a treasure

For me, "A Child's Christmas in Wales" is the single most beautiful piece of Christmas literature in the English language.
And once you hear the author himself reading it, you will be forever enchanted. Dylan Thomas' deep humanity is expressed in every word, and in the spaces between them, in this masterpiece.

DB

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It does not go gentle into that good night.

Like so many other children's books, Amazon.com takes a perverse pleasure in lumping together all version's of Dylan Thomas's, "A Child's Christmas In Wales". So if a reviewer, like myself, wants to review the book that was illustrated in 2004 by Chris Raschka, I'd better make it as clear as possible right from the start. So here it goes. Ahem. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, it gives me the greatest of pleasure to announce that I will now be reviewing "A Child's Christmas In Wales", penned by the great Dylan Thomas and illustrated with grace, aplomb, and a hint of frenzy by accomplished children's book illustrator Chris Raschka. Thank you.

If you, like myself, have gone most of your natural life in ignorance of this story, I'll try to summarize it here. Problem is, summarizing "A Child's Christmas In Wales" is akin to herding cats. This isn't one of those books with a neat little beginning, middle, and end. There's not what you might call "a plot". If the book is ever summarized anywhere it's simply stated that this is Thomas's reminisces of Christmas when he was a child. In doing so, the poet fills this relatively short work with patches of memory, amazing descriptions, and evocative sentences like, "The wind through the trees made noises as of old and unpleasant and maybe webfooted men wheezing in caves". If you're looking for a straightforward Christmas tale with characters, a plot, and a point, go get yourself a copy of "The Best Christmas Pageant Ever" and enjoy it. If, on the other hand, you would like to begin a tradition in your family of reading aloud this magnificent and truly beautiful collection of evocative images, this the only place to go.

There is no tradition in my family of listening or reading this story during the holiday time of year. In fact, prior to reading this book with Raschka's illustrations, I had never even heard so much as a phrase from it. Basically I came to this book as a clean slate. I was just a former college English major with some mild associations with Dylan but certainly no baggage of any kind. Not knowing the history behind the book, I was under the vague and misguided belief that Dylan had written this tale with the full intent that it be a children's book. Not so much. According to the helpful Foreward at the beginning of this tale, I learned that this book was actually a combination of two separate pieces produced during Thomas's lifetime and put together after. So this isn't like when Michael Chabon or Joyce Carol Oates writes a children's book. More like when Woody Guthrie songs are turned into picture books. A posthumous and lucrative printing.

For the child that has never heard this story read before, I found that Raschka was a perfect fit. Certainly I understand that the book has, in the past, been illustrated by the great Trina Schart Hyman. Hyman, however, is a very literal illustrator. She's excellent at realism and intricate characters, but how well does that work when she's paired with Mr. Thomas? This is a book that contains lines like, "All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged, fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find". Hyman doesn't even bother to deal with sentences like that one. Raschka is another matter entirely. Using a gouache, ink, and torn paper technique, the man who brought the world the manic, "John Coltrane's Giant Steps" has finally met his authorial match. The sentence I just wrote above is accompanied by a snowblown seaside town, so filled with cresting waves and freezing snow that you shiver just looking at it. These are pictures that work on the reader's emotions. I have all the respect in the world for Hyman or even Edward Ardizzone, but as accomplished as they are, they're not the right fit. Raschka is.

I was a little baffled by the blurb on the cover of this version of the tale that read, "This beautifully illustrated edition should bring Dylan Thomas's work to a new generation of children" - President Jimmy Carter. I'm a Carter fan myself, but even I can't see what this perfectly nice former president has to do with poetry, children's literature, or even Christmas itself. It might have been better to put a blurb by the Number 1 poet in America. Problem is, who is that person? And would anyone buy a book if they recommended it? These problems aside, it's wonderful for me to hold this book in my hands and know that at long last a great problem has been corrected. Thomas's book has existed for years without proper packaging. Raschka single-handedly has corrected this problem and the world is a better place for it. So thank you, Mr. Raschka. Thank you.


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