The Christmas Rat - Hardcover

AVI's extraordinary range of books include fantasies, sports stories, tales of suspense and terror, historical adventures, and a graphic novel, City of Light, City of Dark, a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year. Other titles among his forty-five books are Poppy (Boston Globe-Horn Book Award), The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle, (Newbery Honor and Boston Globe-Horn Book Award), and Nothing but the Truth (Newbery Honor). He is also the creator of the Breakfast Serials stories by well-known writers which appear, chapter by chapter, in hundreds of newspapers across America, and now have more than forty million devoted weekly readers.

He and his family live in Denver, Colorado.

Gr. 4-7. The week before Christmas starts off cold, dull, and lonely for Eric, with none of his friends around and both his parents working overtime at their stores. When an exterminator arrives to set off a smoke bomb in his apartment, Eric welcomes the diversion, and soon finds himself enlisted in the antivermin war conducted by this eclectic and ultimately terrifying character, who calls himself Anje, short for Anjela Gabrail. Instructed to help trap and kill a rat hiding in the basement storage room, Eric finds himself gradually shifting sides and plotting to protect the rat, despite a death threat from the exterminator. Readers can develop their own theories about Anje, but most will remain confused about whether he is indeed the Angel Gabriel (an appended note briefly discusses Gabriel's presence in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions), or a fantastic but unholy apparition, or a figment of Eric's imagination. Each answer leaves unexplained questions. Although the book is unsatisfying as a Christmas story, readers who enjoy suspense will find this a fast-moving, mysterious, and unsettling tale. Carolyn Phelan
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