A CHRISTMAS TREE WITHOUT A HOUSE

A boy makes a special connection with a pine tree at Christmastime in Wells’ illustrated novella for children.

Seven-year-old Sam Blake and his family live in Maine, just up the road from Albee’s Christmas Tree Farm. He has a special reverence for Christmas, his favorite holiday, and he’s especially excited to pick out a tree after Mrs. Albee advises him that “once a tree becomes a Christmas tree, that tree becomes magical.” As Sam wanders around the lot, he hears a whistle that draws him straight to a white pine that, startlingly, introduces itself as Joseph E.W. Pine. Joseph has recognized Sam as a Tree Person—someone with whom he can communicate and who might understand his loneliness. Because he’s an Eastern white pine, Joseph is never selected for the holiday, so he feels jealous of his neighbors. Even Sam’s family takes a different tree home that day, but Sam doesn’t forget Joseph. He makes a star out of tinfoil on Christmas Eve, venturing out during a burgeoning blizzard to bestow it upon his new friend. The wind and cold almost stop him from achieving his goal; Joseph must summon all his power, and a little Christmas magic, to save the boy and become the tree he was always meant to be. This festive novella is Wells’ newest book since Gumbo Life: A Journey Down the Roux Bayou (2024) and his latest for children since Rascal: A Dog and His Boy (2010), and it tells a short but enchanting tale of a pair of unlikely friends. It teaches the key lesson that helping someone in need can have far wider, and more beautiful, consequences than one can imagine. The artwork, credited to U.S. Illustrations, is brightly colored and cartoonlike, but it leaves something to be desired at times; its proportions can be inconsistent, as in one page’s depiction of a very tiny Sam standing with his family.

A charming holiday tale with a fine lesson but uneven imagery.