From Publishers Weekly
Prolific novelist and Texas gubernatorial candidate Friedman sets his winning tearjerker Christmas story in a faraway land, where a "good king" decides he needs an artist to create a nativity scene to reawaken the Christmas spirit among his dejected subjects. His adviser suggests Benjamin for the job, a 10-year-old who exhibits symptoms of autism (he doesn't speak and feels no emotion, but is a gifted painter). Benjamin undertakes the king's commission and works on the painting in a barn, where he befriends Valerie, a talking pig who brings Benjamin out of his autistic shell. He wants to paint his porcine best friend into the scene, but fears he can't because pigs don't appear in the biblical story. The ending is the saddest thing since
Old Yeller.(Nov.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Product Description
It's a Christmas tale only a man called Kinky could tell.
King Jonjo Mayo the First is in a bind. Every Christmas, he commissions an artist to paint a traditional nativity scene to be dramatically revealed after midnight mass. This year, though, the date is mere weeks away, and he still has not yet found his painter. The king decides to take a chance on a peculiar, mute boy whose artistic genius and clairvoyance are rumored throughout the kingdom. He sends three valiant, if begrudging, knights to seek out the boy in the remote countryside. Finally, they find Benjamin -- and he is, indeed, peculiar. Nobody knows if the child is up to the task, but the king's Christmas tradition -- and Benjamin himself -- might just be saved by a Christmas miracle that comes in the form of a very special pig -- who is rather peculiar herself.
