From Publishers Weekly
The signal event of this novel?the shooting of the protagonist's son?is announced early, and the rest of the book is imbued with a melancholy only occasionally illuminated by spiritual revelation or insight. Edward Ives is a foundling, adopted by a widowed print shop manager and raised uneventfully in an idyllic?though Depression-era?New York City of egg creams, stickball and melting-pot color. Ives's dark looks and his father's long history of working amiably with Cuban pressmen incline him toward a sympathy with Hispanics and their culture, which conveniently anchors Hijuelos in a world he knows well. As a child, Ives shows a penchant for drawing, and he meets his future wife, Annie MacGuire, in a class at the Art Students League. Their first child, Robert (or Roberto), born in 1950, is murdered at age 17 on the streets of New York by a Puerto Rican teenager. The case is celebrated?Robert had just decided to enter the priesthood and was killed for a measly $10; by his side was found a shopping bag full of record albums?Christmas presents carefully chosen for each member of his family. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, Hijuelos showed he can sharply evoke a vibrant, multicultural New York, capturing its music, its menace and its smell. Here, however, every storefront is darkened by the grief of Edward Ives, and every note is tamped. It is as if the lovelorn Nestor of Mambo Kings has returned from the dead to play his sad arias in a world?and a book?absent his lively, spirited brother, Cesar. The author's attempts to render all this as a Dickensian tale of redemption through dignified suffering?Dickens is invoked more than a dozen times?are crude and work no wonders. Not even a long-foreshadowed and deferred meeting at the end of the book between Ives and his son's murderer helps: "Nothing monumental transpired. Niceties were exchanged." Same for the book. BOMC selection; author tour. Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
For Edward Ives, a graphic artist employed by a Madison Avenue advertising firm, Christmas has always been an emotionally charged holiday. It was during the Christmas season that Edward's foster father first visited him at the foundling home, and at Christmas a few years later Edward was finally adopted. Ives met his wife at an art students' Christmas party, and-most importantly-it was during the 1967 Christmas season that Ives's 17-year-old son was senselessly gunned down as he left choir practice. Ives has never fully recovered from the killing, and his unshakable depression threatens to destroy his marriage, as does his strange obsession with rehabilitating the murderer. It is significant that Mr. Ives's most prized possession is a signed edition of Dickens's A Christmas Carol. Hijuelos, best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of Cuban exile, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, breathes new life into the Victorian Christmas genre. Highly recommended.--Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los AngelesCopyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.


Boston Globe
"Stunning...a triumph...with honesty at its core that seems almost shocking in this day and age. A lovely story."


From Booklist
With each novel, from the Pulitzer Prize^-winning Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989) to The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien (1993), Hijuelos has grown more contemplative, more intrigued with the mystical, and more concerned with morality. In this magnetically tender tale, he explores the complexities of spirituality through the medium of a most unusual hero, Mr. Ives. A foundling, Ives' origins are a mystery although his appearance seems to indicate Spanish blood, and, indeed, Ives, a Manhattanite, is drawn to the society of his Cuban and Puerto Rican neighbors. Although his ethnicity is unknown, his devotion to Catholicism and his gift for drawing are indisputable, and they shape his introspective, quietly productive, and ever generous life. Given to much spiritual musing, Ives is stunned when he experiences a full-blown mystical vision on Madison Avenue one brilliant winter afternoon, an epiphany that both elates and troubles him. He passes his spiritualism on to his son, Robert, whose own visions compel him to enter a seminary. But Robert is murdered, shot at point-blank range outside the church just before Christmas. Ives is devastated, his faith shaken to the core. As Hijuelos traces his hero's quest for enlightenment in the wake of this tragedy, he describes all the forms prayer takes, ponders the true value of charity, and celebrates our aptitude for forgiveness. This is a magnificently sad and enchanting novel, a celebration, ultimately, of giving and of grace. Donna Seaman


Philadelphia Inquirer
"Enthralling...A life-affirming novel, a worthy successor to Dickens."


Los Angeles Times
"He tells a story that is 2,000 years old and yet in so doing presents us with a book that is truly startling in its novelty...This is the best book Hijuelos has written. Which is saying something."


Denver Post
"Hijuelos shows us that miracles are something nearer than we believe."


Book Description
Hijuelos' novel tells the story of Mr. Ives, who was adopted from a foundling's home as a child. When we first meet him in the 1950s, Mr. Ives is very much a product of his time. He has a successful career in advertising, a wife and two children, and believes he is on his way to pursuing the typical American dream. But the dream is shattered when his son Robert, who is studying for the priesthood, is killed violently at Christmas. Overwhelmed by grief and threatened by a loss of faith in humankind, Mr. Ives begins to question the very foundations of his life. Part love story--of a man for his wife, for his children, for God--and part meditation on how a person can find spiritual peace in the midst of crisis, Mr. Ives' Christmas is a beautifully written, tender and passionate story of a man trying to put his life in perspective. In the expert hands of Oscar Hijuelos, the novel speaks eloquently to the most basic and fulfilling aspects of life for all of us.


About the Author
Oscar Hijuelos was born of Cuban parentage in New York City in 1951. He is a recipient of the Rome Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, among others. His five previous novels have been translated into twenty-five languages.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

When we first meet him in the 1950s, Mr. Ives is a devoutly religious man who, despite his beginnings in a foundling home, has fashioned for himself an enviable life. A successful Madison Avenue advertising illustrator, Ives is married to a vivacious, artistic woman, Annie, who shares his aesthetic passions and religious beliefs. Together they raise their children, Robert and Caroline, with remarkable fair-mindedness and moral judgment. Ives, who knows nothing of his own natural ancestry, is profoundly drawn to the Spanish cultures and language that have begun to flourish in 1950s New York City. Even after he has risen to a vice-presidency at the advertising agency, he continues to live in his unfashionable neighborhood in Upper Manhattan because he feels at home among his multi-ethnic neighbors, especially his closest friend, Luis Ramirez, and his family. But Ives' perfect world is violated when seventeen-year-old Robert is gunned down by a teenage thug at Christmas, just months before the young man is to enter the seminary. Having once considered himself as possessing "a small, imperfect spiritual gift," Mr. Ives finds himself lost without his son, doubting not only the foundations of his life but his belief in God. Overwhelmed by grief and threatened with a loss of faith in humankind, Ives must wrestle with his doubts and struggle to regain spiritual peace, perhaps even embracing the troubled young man who stole Robert's promising life.

FROM THE CRITICS

Los Angeles Times

He tells a story that is 2,000 years old and yet in so doing presents us with a book that is truly startling in its novelty...This is the best book Hijuelos has written. Which is saying something.

Boston Globe

Stunning...a triumph...with honesty at its core that seems almost shocking in this day and age. A lovely story.

Philadelphia Inquirer

Enthralling...A life-affirming novel, a worthy successor to Dickens.

Denver Post

Hijuelos shows us that miracles are something nearer than we believe.

Rich Nichols

The spirit of Charles Dickens seems to hover over the pages of Oscar Hijuelos' fourth novel. A Christmas Carol comes to mind frequently, for most of the transformations in Edward Ives' life occur during the holiday season. As a very young child of unknown parentage and uncertain ethnicity he is admitted to a Catholic orphanage. His years there permanently fuse in his imagination his love of the season with a belief in the redemptive power of faith. He is adopted by a sweet-tempered widower at Christmas. He meets his wife Anne at Christmas. And, in the tragic event at the heart of the novel, he loses his 17-year-old son to an act of random violence during the holiday. Much of the novel's action is taken up with Ives' long struggle to retain his faith in the face of loss, and to reaffirm it by reaching out to his son's imprisoned murderer.

As he demonstrated in his exuberant earlier novels (The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien), Hijuelos shares with Dickens a deep conviction that often serves to preserve or redeem us. He's also fascinated with the way in which place shapes our lives, recording here an exact, gritty portrait of Mr. Ives' New York City neighborhood from the 1920s to the present.