A Dog of Flanders: A Christmas Story

251 pp. "A Dog of Flanders is an 1872 novel by English author Marie Louise de la Ramée published with her pseudonym "Ouida". It is about a Flemish boy named Nello and his dog, Patrasche and is set in Antwerp. In Japan and Korea the novel has been a children's classic for decades and was adapted into several Japanese films and anime.[1] Since the 1980s, the Belgian board of tourism caught on to the phenomenon and built two monuments honoring the story to please East-Asian tourists. There is a small statue of Nello and Patrasche at the Kapelstraat in the Antwerp suburb of Hoboken, and a commemorative plaque in front of the Antwerp Cathedral donated by Toyota,[1] that was later replaced by a marble statue of the two characters covered by a cobblestone blanket, created by the artist Batist Vermeulen."