Charles Bartholomew

The Sleigh Elf's Daughter Charles Bartholomew

Emily Louise Fairchild is a very special little six-year-old, as you can tell if you look closely at her name. Clara Phillips, her teacher, will tell you that everyone in Emily's first-grade class at Lakeport Central Elementary School is special too. Like Justin Samuels, the class smarty-pants, in need of a good lesson in getting along that only Emily can provide. Like bookworm Michael Bowman, who is just plain smart and unable through no fault of his own to make the friends every child needs in school. Like shy Mariah Evans, with the dark spot on her childhood that she shares with her mother, both of them at-risk souls in need of Emily's intervention. Like Miriam Roseberg, who very soon will be going far away from all of her classmates. And like Clara herself, who, until a snowy day not long before Christmas, almost lets the grasp with which the season has always held her heart slip away until she learned the truth about Emily on the next-to-last day before Winter Break. The young teacher was staring out her classroom window at the winter storm while just below her gaze, her world was beginning to change...