Lucy & Tom's Christmas (Picture Puffin S.)

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To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. I used to read it every Christmas to my children when they were young and now I'm reading it again to my grandchildren.

Hughes has a lovely endearing style to her drawing - I will certainly be reading and collecting many other titles from her. Content surprises are super annoying, especially when you’re 100+ pages in, so here’s my attempt to help you avoid that! This wonderful heartwarming story was read to me as a child and brings back so many happy memories as I now have the privilege of reading it to my niece. One of the loveliest things to do at Christmas is cuddle up and enjoy a good picture book together – and these classic stories have really stood the test of time.And be sure to check out my bio page to learn a little about me and the Picture Book/Chapter Book Calendars I sell on Etsy! Her first book - Lucy and Tom's Day - was published in 1960, and she followed it with, among others, Dogger, and the Alfie series. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. The illustrations are so detailed and the story is very cute with hilariously accurate depictions of children’s emotions.

She won the Kate Greenaway Medal twice and was awarded the OBE for her distinguished service to children's literature.I grew up with Lucy and Tom in the late Seventies and early Eighties, so revisiting the book now feels rather like looking at my own childhood Christmases, laid out in lovely thick gouache.

Perhaps it's the spirit of the season that permeates this book, even for those of us in the Southern Hemisphere. Yes, it is set in time, with ethnicity and class embedded, but is for me a beloved classic, and à compassionate and keenly observed account.

Shirley Hughes was born in West Kirby, near Liverpool, in 1927, and studied fashion and dress design at Liverpool Art School, before continuing her studies at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford. This wonderfully evocative Christmas book reminds me so vividly of my own childhood Christmases, with my mother making mince pies at the big wooden kitchen table and the Salvation Army playing Christmas carols.

She was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was the first recipient of BookTrust's Lifetime Achievement Award.

The page where we see the presents that Lucy and Tom have both bought for their families raised a particular chuckle of recognition. With each review, I provide a Cleanliness Report, mentioning any objectionable content I come across so that parents and/or conscientious readers (like me) can determine beforehand whether they want to read a book or not. She wrote two novels for older children, Hero on a Bicycle , about a 13-year-old Italian boy during the occupation of Florence, and Whistling in the Dark , set during the Liverpool Blitz. The quiet joys of Christmas preparations and the day itself, with great sympathy for a child's perspective.