COAL COUNTRY CHRISTMAS

Mining her own family's experiences in Pennsylvania coal country, Brown debuts with a somber, occasionally poetic tale about a girl visiting her grandmother for the holidays sometime in an indeterminate past. Adult nostalgia seems to guide the girl's first-person narration, and kids without a coal-country connection of their own may not identify with her oscillation between such quaint pleasures as "the old stove... filled with hot, shimmery coals" and the grim toll that mining has taken on the menfolk. "Lung sickness... has left many empty rockers," she comments, and a nighttime walk by a cemetery (where "the row of headstones grows ever longer") adds to the chill. The warmth of family only narrowly predominates, aided by Stevenson's (The Tangerine Tree) textured brushstrokes in blue, purple and green acrylics—although even they have a gray, sooty undertone. Ages 6-up. (Oct.)