Father Christmas and Me

Matt Haig's Father Christmas and Me is a Christmas story for 8 year olds about a human girl trying to fit in at an elf school.

What happens

Amelia Wishart narrates and she gets the awkward part out of the way early. She is eleven, she is from London, and she now lives at 7 Reindeer Road in a gingerbread house with a slide in it.

Everyone around her is an elf. Which means, as she points out, that the weird unusual creature in Elfhelm is her.

This is the third book about Father Christmas and it carries straight on, so a reader starting here will be picking things up as they go.

What they get is Elfhelm in enormous detail, and the detail is the fun. A clock that tells elf hours called Very Early Indeed and Way Past Bedtime. A sweet shop selling Giggle Candy and a fierce aniseed thing called Blitzen's Revenge. Hope Toffee, which tastes of whatever you hope it will taste of.

There is a Truth Pixie who cannot tell a lie and is therefore having the worst day of her life at a wedding. There is a troll so enormous she has to sit outside and watch through the window.

The wedding is the best bit. In Elfhelm you get married by looking at each other and laughing at the same moment, which takes a while, because the jokes are dreadful on purpose.

Haig lets the sadness sit right up against all that. Amelia's mother caught an illness from cleaning chimneys and Amelia looked after her and could not save her. Her father had already gone. She was sent to a workhouse.

None of that happens in this book. It is why she is here, and she tells you in about a page, plainly and without any fuss.

It does come back, though. When the Hope Toffee turns into roasted chestnuts she tastes a Christmas from before her mother got ill, and she stops eating it.

So it is a very silly book with a real ache underneath, which is a thing Haig does properly well. A reader who likes being made to laugh and then caught off guard will get exactly that.

One to read out loud if you get the chance. The elf names alone are worth it.

Amelia also says, quite early, that she managed to smash her own happiness into a million pieces. That is her warning you.

What to read next

Your reader will get far more from it after A Boy Called Christmas, which is where Nikolas is an ordinary woodcutter's son in Finland with a doll made out of a turnip.