The Christmas Village

The Christmas Village is a 2015 INKSPOKES Select Book Award Winner and the winner of the 2013 Blogger Book Fair Reader's Choice Award for children's action/adventure literature.When Jamie Reynolds visits his grandparents' Vermont home for Christmas, he just wishes things would go back to the way they were before his dad disappeared. Time and again he is drawn to the miniature Christmas village that Grandma has put out to cheer him up. He imagines that life in the village would be perfect and wishes he could disappear into it, leaving his troubles behind. Late one night, the village comes to life before Jamie's eyes, and his fantasy of escaping into it becomes very real indeed. He discovers that the village is called Canterbury, where the year is 1932. Jamie becomes fast friends with Kelly and Christopher Pennysworth, and is taken in by the kindly Ida, who runs the local boarding house. But he also makes a dangerous enemy of the mysterious and menacing Jim Gordon, whose return to town is nothing but trouble. As he desperately races against time to find his way back home for Christmas, Jamie is suddenly faced with a frightening choice: to go ahead with his plan to leave, or to stay and help his friends, at the risk of never going home again. The Christmas Village is an adventure the whole family will love, filled with suspense, secrets and surprises to the very last page. Now available: Return to Canterbury, the sequel to The Christmas Village Join Jamie and his friends in a new adventure that pits them against a ruthless villain whose plans threaten their beloved Canterbury.

Melissa Ann Goodwin grew up in Andover, Massachusetts, where she spent a happy childhood living in her imagination and writing stories in her head. It was only a matter of time before those stories spilled out onto the written page. She has been published extensively in children’s and national magazines and won a Writer’s Digest Annual Poetry Competition Award in 2010. The Christmas Village and its sequel, Return to Canterbury, are the culmination of her lifelong dream to write the kind of books she loved to read as a child.