Crowning a classic upon publication is a pretty speculative business.  This has not stopped Scholastic from touting J. K. Rowling’s new chapter book as a children’s book icon to-be:

From one of the world’s greatest storytellers comes this heartwarming, page-turning adventure about one child’s love for his most treasured thing, and how far he will go to find it.  With dazzling illustrations from renowned artist Jim Field, The Christmas Pig is destined to become a beloved classic for the whole family.

In spite of the ongoing protests against Rowling, The Christmas Pig began its run for immortality its first week, with sales of over 61,000 copies, making it the number one book.

The hero of this Christmas Eve miracle story is seven-year-old Jack, who looks a lot like the Boy Who Lived in Jim Field’s illustrations. The story proper begins on Christmas Eve when he calls his stepsister a loser and she retaliates by hurling out of the car window his companion and confidant DP, a grubby old stuffed pig.  Angrily refusing the exact replacement she offers as an apology, Jack trashes his room and collapses.

He is roused out of sleep by the voices of things in his room which have come to life and are debating whether Jack ought to be sent to the Land of the Lost to rescue DP  on this night of  “miracles and lost causes.”  Jack swears he loves DP so much that he will do anything to get him back, including accepting the unlikable replacement pig as guide.  As soon as Jack and the pig lose themselves under the Christmas tree, they fall into the Land of the Lost, a country like a vast deep wooden box with holes drilled in the “sky” connecting it to the human world.  They land in Mislaid, the holding center, where lost things are sorted by the value owners placed on them and then shipped out to the appropriate zones.

Things their owners don’t miss are classified as surplus and pushed down a chute to the Wastes of the Unlamented where the Loser, the land’s monstrous ruler will  pick them off at his pleasure.  Things unlikely to be wanted again go to the ramshackle town of Disposable, whose streets are right out of a classic Western.  Useful things whose owners might realize are wanted,  wait in the pretty gingerbread houses of Bother It’s Gone.  Things their owners long to recover travel by train from there across the Wastes to the City of the Missed   The existence of that city, which resembles the dancing sets in Top Hat,  is a closely guarded secret, as is the Isle of the Beloved across the sea, where Santa Claus and precious toys reside in a Barbie beach house Paradise.

The social system is riddled with the arbitrary evils of discrimination.  Once a thing is separated from its owner, an event over which it had no agency, it is treated like a criminal, not a victim.   Its future remains subject to its owner’s whims: if missed, then it might be reclassified and relocated or released.  But every time it is misplaced subsequently, the process starts all over again.  Lost things are mostly  cheap objects made of fabric, yarn, cardboard, paper, plastic, and rubber, hence they are despised.  Things made of metal lord over them. The Loss Adjusters and guards, tools and implements that punch, poke, scrape, grate, and cut, report to the ruler of the country, the robotic Loser, whose gigantic steel body  gleams with bits of cogs, lids, springs, etc. broken off prey’s bodies, after he sucks out every drop of awakeness, or feelings absorbed from owners that make them alive.

Love will prove the strongest weapon against the country’s terrible laws.  Jack and the replacement pig must return home with DP a minute before midnight Christmas day,  or be trapped there forever.   They have the luxury of a little time, because every hour of human time equals a day in the Land of the Lost.  Jack has heroic determination, but few survival skills.  He wouldn’t have gotten far in bare feet and thin pajamas without the resourceful, quick-witted replacement pig, who is surprisingly loyal for no good reason.  Jack learns why on the Isle of the Blessed, when DP explains that it was always the plan of his brother the replacement pig CP to sacrifice himself so the two friends could be reunited.  It was enough for CP to make the boy happy, believing it impossible to ever be loved in return.  Jack now realizes that he cannot leave CP behind and races against the clock to the Loser’s lair, where in the show down he saves CP and releases the surplus things trapped in there and sends them above to be recycled.

Will The Christmas Pig join the circle of classic holiday books within a few years, as Scholastic has so confidently predicted?  The Christmas miracle story is always being reinvented—think of John Masefield’s The Box of Delights (1935), Dr. Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1957), Raymond Briggs’s The Snowman (1978), Chris van Allsburg’s The Polar Express (1985).

But Rowling chose not to write an updated Christmas story reflecting the values of diversity, inclusion, and equity that gatekeepers have been calling for.  She has produced instead is a twenty-first century fantasy in which the protagonist grows by coping with familial troubles and resisting systemic injustice to save others.  Although Jack is from a white family of moderate circumstances, Rowling is betting on young readers from different backgrounds being able to relate to his predicaments in the real and imaginary worlds.   His adventures set in a modern dystopia right out of a big box store ultimately lifts up Christian values, striking many of the same chords as the Harry Potter series in the portrayal of self-sacrifice motivated by a deep sense of love.

How her magical moral tale will be received by a multi-generational and diverse readership across classes is beyond my powers of prediction. The noble CP may bring tears to the eyes of any lover of The Velveteen Rabbit.  The escape from Disposable in a lunchbox that smells of egg salad may get a laugh every time.  The royal family’s shocking display of  dysfunction at the banquet may be an homage to the allegorical characters in The Phantom Toll Booth that works for some and but not others.  Rowling’s Christmas miracle story may for some time continue to generate controversy that is not rooted in its literary quality–it remains to be seen if her inspired world building will trump those objections in the long run.

In honor of the 2022 Coretta Scott King award given posthumously to Floyd Cooper by , here is the tribute to Mr. Cooper posted  this summer.

Three-time winner of the Coretta Scott King Award for the most distinguished portrayal of African American experience in literature for children or teens, Floyd Cooper passed away July 16 2021 from cancer. He was sixty-five.

So many of the 110 books he illustrated brought out the heroic, intimate, and joyful dimensions in American Black lives past and present, beginning in 1988 with Eloise Greenfield’s Grandpa’s Face. Over the years Cooper collaborated with notable Black writers for children and young adults Eloise Greenfield, Joyce Carol Thomas, Walter Dean Myers, Nikki Grimes, Patricia McKissack, Jacqueline Woodson, Howard Bryant, and Carole Boston Weatherford.  The last book he illustrated, Weatherford’s Unspeakable: The Tulsa Race Massacre, drew on his grandfather’s memories as a survivor of the tragedy.  Nikki Grimes told Publisher’s Weekly, that the book was “a good note to go out on. He left us all wanting more.”

Cooper was a native of Tulsa, Oklahoma and one of his earliest memories was scratching shapes into the side of the house  at age three.  Art kept him grounded during a childhood unsettled by divorce: in each of the eleven elementary schools he attended, he connected with the art teachers and showed them his work.  His talent was recognized by the award of an art scholarship to the University of Oklahoma, where he graduated in 1978 with a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts.  After college, he headed out to Kansas City to start work in the greeting card design department of Hallmark. The unpromising job of erasing and changing old cards was the genesis of the “subtractive process” that gives his illustrations their distinctive look. In 2018 he described in illuminating detail his unique approach to picture making, a process of erasing shapes from a background of oil paint.

Cooper’s art radiates a warmth that is partly grounded in capturing the individuality of the figures on the pages.  He typically used models, often  drawing his sons, their friends, and family members.  In an interview with Brown Bookshelf, he explained that “I tend to focus on the humanity of my subjects, the details of expression that add a certain reality to the work. Real faces = real art. That’s the goal anyway.”   The uniqueness of the brown faces in every book linger in the mind.In Sprouting Wings: The True Story of James Herman Banning, the First African American Pilot to Fly Across the United States by Louisa Jaggar and Shari Becker (New York: Crown, 2021), the reader also feels the young pilot’s excitement  when he pulls the plane up off the ground for the first time.

The climax of Ben and the Emancipation Proclamation by Pat Sherman (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010) shows the moment in the slave prison when young Benjamin Holmes no longer has to conceal his ability to read. One night word gets around the prison that Abraham Lincoln has freed the slaves and the illiterate inmates pool their money to buy a newspaper to see if the rumor is true. They ask Ben to read it to them and he does so with all the gravity the occasion demands.

Hands as a symbol of the dignity of work recurs in Cooper’s art.  Charles R. Smith Jr. tells the story of enslaved men’s unappreciated contribution to the construction of the White House in Brick by Brick (New York: Amistad, 2013).  Cooper draws hands skillfully wielding tools, lifting heavy burdens, and perhaps most poignantly, mixing clay, sand, and water to make bricks.  The weary boy looks at some point in the distance as he works.

A grandfather’s still nimble fingers can teach his grandson to tie his shoes, pick out a tune on the piano, throw a baseball, and knead bread dough.  Yet those skilled hands were stigmatized as dirty and forbidden by his employer Wonder Bread to touch the dough because white customers wouldn’t eat the product if they knew who made it. These Hands by Margaret H. Mason (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,2010) celebrates the Black workers successful labor action against discriminatory labor practices at the Detroit Wonder Bread bakery in the 1960s.

The young Frederick Douglass’s face is a study in just anger against an agent of cruel and arbitrary injustice, an anger strong enough to sustain resistance, even if it means risking death.  This remarkable illustration appears in Walter Dean Myers’ Frederick Douglass: The Lion Who Wrote History (New York: Harper, 2017).

Rosa Parks, her hair pulled primly back, in Aaron Reynolds” Back of the Bus (New York: Philomel, 2010) doesn’t strike the reader as the kind of a woman who sets out to make trouble.  Yet her quiet face looks as if she has decided not to be frightened  an image of an ordinary person who has discovered power deep within to protest disrespectful treatment against her people. The focus of this illustration of Black Wall Street in Carole Boston Weatherford’s Unspeakable: The Tulsa Race Massacre (Minneapolis: Carolrhoda, 2021) is the confident, stylish lady who stands out in the crowd of other prosperous-looking shoppers.  Is she a symbol of the resentment White Tulsans harbored against the prosperous Black community that boiled over in 1921?Cooper’s joy in celebrating Black beauty takes its most irresistible form in his portraits of children.  This illustration of a little girl exploding with laughter is just as beguiling as the more famous one on the cover of Joyce Carol Thomas’s poems in Blacker the Berry (New York: Joanna Cotler Books, 2008).   In this fiercely partisan age we are living through, the compassion that shines through Floyd C