The Polar Express

A boy who no longer quite believes in Santa Claus hears a mysterious train idling outside his house on Christmas Eve, and its conductor invites him aboard the Polar Express, already carrying a car full of children in pajamas, bound for the North Pole. The train climbs mountains and crosses frozen wilderness while the children sing carols and drink hot chocolate served from an enormous silver pot, and at the North Pole, among an assembled crowd of elves, Santa chooses the boy to receive the first gift of Christmas. He asks for a single silver bell cut from Santa's own sleigh harness, and on the ride home discovers, to his despair, that it has slipped through a hole in his pocket and is lost. On Christmas morning his sister finds a small box under the tree containing the bell, along with a note from Santa saying he found it on the seat of his sleigh and had the boy's torn pocket mended; when the boy rings it, only he and his sister can hear its sound, since their parents, no longer able to believe, hear nothing at all. The book ends years later, the narrator now an old man, insisting the bell still rings for him, as it does for everyone who truly believes.

Van Allsburg draws the entire book in pastel pencils that require constant, fine sharpening, working in deep purples and blues inspired by the nineteenth century German painter Caspar David Friedrich, producing what one Newsweek critic called "sumptuous pastel effects of train lights seen through falling snow." His deliberately blurred, softened backgrounds give the whole book a hushed, dreamlike warmth well suited to a Christmas Eve reading with children four through nine.