The Girl Who Saved Christmas, Matt Haig

Illustrated by Chris Mould

Pages: 336

Publisher: Canongate

Release Date: 3rd November 2016
Edition: UK e-proof, NetGalley review copy

Other Titles by this Author: The Runaway Troll, Echo Boy, How to Be a Cat, The Radleys, The Humans, Reasons to Stay Alive, A Boy Called Christmas

If magic has a beginning, can it also have an end?

When Amelia wants a wish to come true she knows just the man to ask - Father Christmas.

But the magic she wants to believe in is starting to fade, and Father Christmas has more than impossible wishes to worry about. Upset elves, reindeer dropping out of the sky, angry trolls and the chance that Christmas might be cancelled. 

But Amelia isn't just an ordinary girl. And - as Father Christmas is going to find out - if Christmas is going to be saved, he might not be able to do it alone...   

I didn’t love the first installment in this middle grade series nearly as much as I had hoped, so I was hoping for more from The Girl Who Saved Christmas - I ended up enjoying it a lot more. 

On Christmas Eve, Father Christmas travels to London in 1841 to visit Amelia, the girl who gave the world enough hope for Christmas to begin, and he needs her help again. I loved the journey through Victorian London; meeting Charles Dickens and Queen Victoria and exploring the poverty, illness and workhouses of the period really made the whole book twice as Christmassy for some way.

The messages of hope, magic and finding light in the dark were all wonderful and gave me the serious warm fuzzies, but I did find the final quarter of the book a little too much. There was such a lot going on what with Noosh, Father Christmas and Amelia in London and an unexpected (and, I think, unnecessary) romance coming out of nowhere. It all made the end a little rushed and a little forced.

The Girl Who Saved Christmas is a lovely Christmas story all about hope and magic that I can see being the perfect bedtime story in the few nights running up to Christmas.

Thanks to NetGalley and Canongate for the review copy.

Sophie