Kids into Books: Christmas Sonata

Author: Gary Paulsen

Illustrator: Leslie Bowman

Publisher: Macmillan, $13.95

Age Group: 8–10 years

It comes on everybody at a certain time in their life to not believe in Santa Claus.

For me it came during the war, the Second World War, and my father was fighting in Europe.

We lived in a large, poor apartment in Minneapolis for a time then, and my mother worked in a laundry during the day and could not always be with me.

Different people on our floor took care of me at different times, or were supposed to, but often I just had the run of the floor.

I was probably a nuisance and yet most people were more than nice to me.

I would sometimes spend whole days in different apartments, eating cookies and listening to the radio or playing war with a small wooden gun that I had and everybody seemed to tolerate me.