The faith of an aunt. The strength of a stranger. The persistence of a mother.
Nine-year-old Anna Ghere has never known anything but a crowded house in a small Indiana railroad town — and Christmas has always been the best of it. But the winter of 1933 finds Jeffries worn thin. Streetlights burn out with no money to replace them. Fewer porch lights come on each year.
Then, at her baby sister’s birthday supper, Anna says out loud the thing her family has been circling for months. By Monday morning her father has walked away up South Street with his satchel in hand, and her mother has gone silent.
Looking for a way to undo what she’s done, Anna climbs the steps of the shuttered Victorian on the corner — the house the children call haunted — to wipe a thrown egg from a stranger’s door. The woman who opens it is nearly blind, dressed in mourning, and owns the railroad. She will change everything: for Anna, for her mother, and for a town that has forgotten how to expect anything good.
What follows is a season of small miracles. Through all of them, Anna holds to one prayer — that the angels will reignite the embers of love between her parents and make her family whole again.
A story that began at my mother’s kitchen table. Christmas Angels grew out of the memories my mother, LouDell Taylor, carried from growing up in Depression-era Indiana — the hard winters, the quarantine signs on front doors, the cafes and depots and pageants of a town that no longer exists quite the way she knew it. I wrote it so those memories would outlast the people who held them, and so readers finding their own hard season might expect miracles in the darkest of times.
Reading it with your book club? There’s a free discussion guide — questions grouped by section, themes to explore, and recipes drawn straight from the book. [Get the Book Club Guide →]