Now one of my favorite Xmas books; I'd love to hear it read aloud by a someone with an Irish accent. Touching, but heartbreaking. (Why do I love that so much?) ( )

After reading Margaret Hodge's recent adaptation of this Irish Christmas story (The Wee Christmas Cabin), which first saw print in Ruth Sawyer's 1941 collection, The Long Christmas, I was quite eager to track down the original version, published in this picture-book edition in 2005, with beautiful illustrations by Max Grafe. As much as I liked Hodges' retelling, I suspected that I would enjoy Sawyer's even more, and I was right!

The moving story of Oona Hegarty, a tinker's child left, when still a newborn babe, on the doorstep of a farming family in Donegal, The Wee Christmas Cabin of Carn-na-Ween is a tale of kindness and cruelty, of prejudice and love, and of the long-awaited fulfillment of a dream. It follows Oona as she spends her life caring for the children and elderly relatives of others, unable to raise a family of her own, as no man will have a "tinker's child" for a wife. Finally, old and worn out, and determined not to take any more food from the mouths of starving children during that most terrible time in Irish history - the Great Famine - Oona heads out onto the bog one snowy Christmas Eve, to meet death like "an old friend." But the fairies - the "Good People," who have been watching Oona since she was a baby, and have noted her long life of service - have other ideas...

Max Grafe's mixed media illustrations here are darkly satisfying, particularly the outdoor scenes, with their blue overtones, and give the book a true fairy-tale feeling. The language is rich, with an authentic Irish dialect missing from Hodges' retelling. The narrative is longer, more fully fleshed out, and - for me - more satisfying, than the contemporary adaptation, but I think that today's children might also find it more difficult. The Wee Christmas Cain of Carn-na-Ween is, after all, a text-heavy picture-book, so I would recommend it more to older children, those in the beginning-reader, and early chapter-book stages, than to the very young. ( )

Written in 1941, a charming Irish folktale, lovingly illustrated. Would make a good read-aloud for older elementary age kids and could very possibly generate a lot of discussion. ( )