DECEMBER

An understated holiday story with dazzling art, by the duo behind Smoky Night (1994) and Going Home (1996). Simon and his mom live in a cardboard box, but they have a scrap of a Christmas tree, some found decorations including Simon's toy soldier, and an angel on the wall, named December, tom from an old calendar. On Christmas Eve, an old woman begs them to share their box, and they let her in, where Simon offers her one of the two cookies he is saving for Christmas day. In the morning, the old woman is gone, and the angel herself, singing softly, seems to fill the doorway before fading away. The next Christmas Eve finds Simon and his mother in a real apartment She has found a job, and the December angel is on their new wall. Diaz's acrylic, watercolor, and gouache paintings have the monumentality and intensity of stained glass, with their flat planes of color and black outlines. The agitation of some of his work has been subsumed into a gentler and more emotionally resonant style, set against collage backgrounds full of roses and angels. The angel, with the wings of the feathered cloak of a Mesoamerican goddess, is a glorious creation. Seen in almost every spread in a glowing palette of rose and gold, she draws the eye and the heart again and again. (Picture book. 5-8)