The Girl Who Saved Christmas

Matt Haig's The Girl Who Saved Christmas is a Christmas story for 8 year olds about a chimney sweep in Victorian London who asks Father Christmas for a miracle.

What happens

Amelia Wishart writes him a letter. She wants a new brush, a spinning top and a book by Charles Dickens. Then item four, which she says is the important one. She wants her ma to get better.

Her mother was a chimney sweep and can't go up chimneys any more, or do anything except lie in bed and cough. Amelia sweeps the chimneys now.

Up at the other end of the world, Elfhelm is having its best day of the year. There's a Bank of Chocolate and a Figgy Pudding café and offices built of reinforced gingerbread. The elf band are singing a song about Father Christmas that rhymes red coat with goat.

And then the ground shakes. Just slightly, and nobody says anything.

The Truth Pixie arrives, out of breath, and tells Father Christmas to cancel Christmas and run for the hills. She physically cannot lie, which is what makes her so alarming.

The two halves of the book are lovely against each other. Elfhelm is all silliness and sugar. London is soot and cold and a man called Mr Creeper who runs a workhouse and looks, Haig says, like a crow who decided one dreary Tuesday to become a human.

Amelia is brilliant. She kicks Mr Creeper in the shins three times for being rude about her mother. Her cat goes for his trousers.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

Worth knowing up front, and it isn't really a spoiler because it happens in the opening chapters. Amelia's mother dies on the page. There's a short chapter where Amelia holds her hand and her mother says a last few words, and the book even warns you in the chapter title that it's a sad one. It's beautifully done and it is properly sad. A child who has lost someone, or who worries about that, may need you nearby. A child who can take it will find that everything good in the rest of the book is built on it.

The magic in this one is about hope running out, so the tone is darker than the cover suggests, right through to trolls and a smashed sleigh.

What to read next

This isn't where the story starts, by the way. A Boy Called Christmas is in the library, and it's the one before. Father Christmas is an ordinary boy called Nikolas in the middle of Finland with a turnip for a doll, and it explains rather a lot.