It’s hard to be a Scrooge about a new Christmas book for children, but this collaboration between veteran children’s writer Lucie Papineau and two-time Governor General’s Award-winning illustrator Stéphane Poulin seems to miss its mark. There’s just too much sugar in this plum pudding, and it’s apt to give the reader indigestion.

A picture book inspired by Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol sounds like a promising idea, and Poulin’s atmospheric Victorian interiors are almost worth the price of the book. The off-kilter room in which the pig character Barton (a stand-in for Ebenezer Scrooge) sees himself in Christmas Yet to Come, surrounded by shrouded furniture and counting over his old hoarded toys, is eerie and alarming, and Barton’s surreal journey down the mousehole (the Christmas spirits are replaced by a mouse) is properly disorienting.

For all the darkness inherent in the story and present in the pictures, however, the problems seem simplistic and the solutions pat. The world of loving and suffering humanity from which Dickens’ Scrooge has tried to isolate himself here becomes a group of “homeless orphans,” represented in the pictures – oddly enough – by stylized animals in Victorian dress. Barton, a selfish wealthy orphan, learns to identify and share with the other children, and a final picture shows them all well dressed, parading together through the town, but still with caps out for donations.

The message of learning to share and connect with other people is very clear – perhaps too much so – but the real magic of Dickens’ story is lacking. Even young children can enjoy a good reading or recording of A Christmas Carol, and Dickens has a great deal more to offer them.