The Angel Doll: A Christmas Story - Hardcover

Bledsoe, Jerry

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312171048 ISBN 13: 9780312171049

Publisher: St. Martin's Press, 1999

Synopsis

If even a small part of a child still lives within your heart, you can't help but be captivated by this deeply moving novella based on bestselling author Jerry Bledsoe's childhood memories.

Set in a North Carolina manufacturing town during the 1950s, it is the poignant story of two ten-year-old boys and their search for an angel doll, a search that turned into a lesson of love.

Every day Whitey Black reads The Littlest Angel to his sister Sandy, a four-year-old stricken with polio. Now she wants just one thing for Christmas: an angel doll. Unfortunately, in this small North Carolina town, no one has ever heard of such a thing. Nevertheless, Whitey Black and his best friend set out to find her one, at great cost and for even greater reward.

Along the way they learn much about sadness and heartbreak, but most important, they learn about the transformative power of love.

The Angel Doll is about childhood reaching out in later life and grabbing hold-never to be forgotten or remembered exactly as it was. Timeless and touching, The Angel Doll is sure to become a family favorite and a tradition for years to come.

About this title

About the Author:

Jerry Bledsoe is the author of The New York Times #1 bestseller Bitter Blood, and others. He has written for Esquire, The New York Times, and many other publications. He lives in North Carolina and Virginia.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Cleanly written and nicely detailed Christmas story, not wholesale sentimentality, by true-crime writer Bledsoe (Before He Wakes, 1994, etc.). Back in the '50s in Thomasville, North Carolina, ``Whitey'' Black and the narrator (nameless), both newsboys and fourth- graders, become friends when they go halves on a paper route. Neither boy is well off. Whitey lives on welfare with his cigarette-smoking mother and polio-crippled four-year-old sister, Sandy. One Thanksgiving a charity group gives the Blacks a bag of groceries, shaming Whitey before his friend. As time passes, though, Whitey at last allows the narrator into his house, where he meets Sandy. Sandy's one source of solace seems to come from the story The Littlest Angel, which Whitey repeatedly reads to her. Come Christmas, Whitey decides to buy his sister a much longed for angel doll. But no such item is in the stores. When the two lads see a big doll that someone might be able to dress as an angel, Whitey devotes his savings to buying the nine-dollar toy and hiring a seamstress. But then Sandy is hospitalized and dies before she can receive the angel. Though the narrator never sees Whitey again, he discovers, as an adult, that his old friend has been giving out dolls to a children's hospital every Christmas. Bledsoe says his story was inspired by ``my memory of the first person I'd know to die.'' But the tale, while sometimes affecting, has little impact, perhaps mainly because Sandy lacks weight on the page. There's an idyllic moment when the boys go out with the narrator's father to gather two Christmas trees and mistletoe from the woods, and indeed, this short novel's best quality has less to do with the plot than with descriptions evoking local stores and streets at Christmas. May well move young, unsophisticated readers. (Literary Guild alternate selection) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0312171048
• ISBN 13: 9780312171049
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 112