She’s done it again: J.K. Rowling has written a captivating children’s book. The Christmas Pig (Little Brown, £20) is about a toy pig, Dur Pig (DP for short), a boy called Jack and what happens when DP gets chucked out of a car and is replaced with an unwelcome Christmas Pig. It’s also about how horrible divorce is for children, what happens to lost things and how the least prepossessing creatures can show courage and self-sacrifice. It’s also a rattling adventure story about Jack and the Christmas Pig’s progress across the Land of the Lost, pursued by a scary ogre called the Loser. It takes place on Christmas Eve, ‘a night for miracles and lost causes’, and is much more Christmassy than any of the festive books about Santa’s lost elves and underperforming reindeer which bring out the Herod in so many of us.
It’s customary nowadays to categorise children’s books by age range, but it’s hard to know how you’d bracket Fish for Supper by M.B.
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