Author: Michael Matthew Dutton

Publisher: Linden Park Publishers Limited

Published: 2012-12

Total Pages: 420

ISBN-13: 9780978665524

In "Christmasville" readers discovered the magic and mystique of a community, perpetually locked in a wintry wonderland of the yuletide season. With the passing of each calendar "year," homes and buildings were rearranged according to a new "plan" of things - as if checkers upon a playing board, presenting for Mary Jane the niggling notion that something was awry. There was the issue of ... memory, and forgetfulness ... of trees without leaves ... of New York City and Boston cream pie. Seeking answers to her question, Mary Jane embarked on a series of perilous journeys through the forests and mountains of the uncharted wilderness, determined to resolve the enigma of "Christmasville". But if Mary Jane was motivated by personal faith, a spirit of independence and the quest for truth in the first volume of the trilogy, Madeleine and Esmeralda are driven by purposes quite different in the second. For both girls it is the embracement of hope - of salvation for Madeleine, of illumination for Esmeralda - that propels them along their separate paths. Madeleine, a daughter of the Magian line, is bequeathed "calinda al emeris magus"--The rare "gift of the fourth king"--which enables her to perceive what others cannot. But, as with many gifts, there are prices for such things. The bloom of a rose, or the fruit of a tree, does not come without the promise of a thorn or the threat of blight. For Esmeralda, the fortune teller who once read Tarot cards for Mary Jane on First Night, the journey forward is impeded by that affliction which haunts everyone who calls Christmasville home: memory - the multiple perforations of memory, which prevent her from summoning images of her long lost father, her mother, her brother, Oscar ... and of what became of them all. As readers follow Madeleine and Esmeralda in their journeys, they discover the origin and dynamics of the colossal clock tower by the "house at the end of the world," the functions of the giant transformers that generate much more than heat and light for the idyllic town of Christmasville, the "secret of lightning" and the remarkable phenomenon of "thin places." But for the astute reader - the reader who discovered in "Christmasville" a confirmation of that sometimes elusive, though always enduring virtue of faith - "Finding Christmasville" will be a journey of illumination, an epiphany, a celebration in that most wondrous and fragile of human aspirations: hope. "Another dickens of a tale!" (Kris Kringle, the "North Pole Gazette").