CHRISTMAS AFTER ALL, by Kathryn Lasky, Scholastic Inc., New York, 2001, 185 pages, $10.95

If ever there was a book perfectly suited to its time of publication it is Kathryn Lasky’s “Christmas After All: The Great Depression and Minnie Swift.” Although separated from us by nearly 70 years, its fictional characters mirror many of the feelings of post-Sept. 11 Americans.

Financial analysts have confirmed what most folks in Maine already knew. We’re in a recession. As the Santa’s Helper Fund columns so eloquently remind us, many families are struggling to get some little bit of Christmas for their beloved children. As the book opens the day after Thanksgiving 1932, Minnie is in a funk, comparing her holidays with those from her past.

“This is going to be an odd Christmas, no doubt about it. Instead of sugar plums and stockings stuffed with goodies and sacks of presents under the tree – a Time of Bounty – I am thinking of this time as a Time of the Dwindling. Everything is diminishing: our money, the light of day, and even the hours that Papa works.”

When Willie Faye, an orphan from the Dust Bowl, comes to live with her family, Minnie is amazed. Willie Faye has never used a toilet or a bathtub or heard of popular movie stars and comic book characters. Because her education hasn’t been “up to snuff,” even though she is 11, like Minnie, she is placed in the fourth grade.

Being demoted and being snubbed by a snobby schoolmate doesn’t faze Willie Faye in the least. Her new life is full of novel and exciting experiences like eating canned peaches. And she helps Minnie see fresh possibilities. When the family receives two new hens with colorful plumage, Willie Faye comes up with the idea of making feather-trimmed hats for Christmas presents.

Willie Faye’s most important message to Minnie, that she has to believe things will work out, is delivered when Minnie has suffered the most devastating loss of her whole life. “Other people’s fathers leave, but not ours. Now it feels like there is this big hole in our family, and I feel as if I have been snapped in two.”

Here’s where the protagonist of Lasky’s poignant coming-of-age novel will most resonate with today’s readers young and old. An unforeseen tragedy has turned her world upside down. Thoughts of her Dad push other concerns out of her mind as she envisions him riding the rails or heating his hands over an oil drum in a shantytown.

Minnie beautifully personifies the tempestuous shifting of emotion and thoughts so common to 11-year-old girls, so perplexing to loving moms and dads. Her spirits soar and plunge at the pace of a roller coaster ride. Her concerns range from the commonplace to the profound. She spends a lot of time bemoaning Depression-era food. Tuna dish rates a 10 on the Vomitron, a scale of grossness. But she is touched deeply when, while delivering a treat to the desperately poor folks in a shantytown, she is asked by a grimy-faced little boy if his cookie can turn by Christmas into a real Santa Claus if he doesn’t eat it.

Make this wonderful book a family read-aloud. Share it over hot cocoa and molasses crinkles (recipe included). Create memories that will last long after this year’s must-have toys have faded into oblivion.

Lasky, a Maine summer resident, also has written two other books in Scholastic’s fine Dear America series: “A Journey to the New World: The Diary of Remember Patience Whipple” and “Dreams in the Golden Country: The Diary of Ziporah Feldman.”