Celebrate the Season – Home for the Holidays

Taylor Garland's Home for the Holidays is a Christmas story for 10 year olds about a girl trying to feel festive in seventy degrees of Florida sunshine.

What happens

Alyssa Sing moved from Massachusetts in August, because her mum got a much better job. It's the eighth of December, her mum has just come back from a run in shorts, and they're opening the windows to let the warm air in.

Alyssa doesn't complain about it. That's rather the trouble with Alyssa.

Her brother Cody is a year above her and collects friends without trying. Three sleepovers since term started (Alyssa has been to none, because she hasn't yet made a friend close enough to be asked).

So she says the right thing to her mum, apologises for having an opinion, and then catches herself saying "back home" about a place that isn't home any more.

Who hasn't done that after a move?

What she does have is knitting. She learned it from Ryder at her old school, who started the knitting club and taught her everything, and she's a perfectionist about it. One scarf can take weeks. She embroiders snowflakes along the edges when the mood strikes at eleven at night.

Three finished scarves. That's the lot.

And that's where the story gets going, because those three scarves are about to be the reason somebody talks to her.

It's warm and low-stakes. Nobody is cruel. The worst thing happening to Alyssa is that she's lonely and far too polite to say so, which will be painfully recognisable to a child who has just changed schools.

Two things to flag. It's American throughout, with OJ for breakfast, a mall, dollars, Thanksgiving and temperatures in Fahrenheit.

And the characters are a little older than your reader. Alyssa is in seventh grade and Cody in eighth, so in our terms they're at secondary school. Nothing in it is unsuitable. It just means a younger reader is looking up at them rather than across at them.

What to read next

If the new-family-at-Christmas part appeals more than the new-school part, Let It Snow is the other book in this series. Chloe is off to a snowy lodge for the weekend to meet her dad's girlfriend, and the girlfriend's daughter, for the very first time.