Father Christmas and Me

By: Matt Haig

Narrated by: Natascha McElhone

It isn't always easy growing up as a human in Elfhelm, even if your adoptive parents are the newly married Father Christmas and Mary Christmas. For one thing, Elf School can be annoying when you have to sing Christmas songs every day - even in July - and when you fail all your toy-making tests. Also it can get very, very cold.

But when the jealous Easter Bunny and his rabbit army launch an attack to stop Christmas, it's up to Amelia, her new family and the elves to keep Christmas alive. Before it's too late....

©2017 Matt Haig (P)2017 Canongate Books

I don’t really like the truth pixie

I like the idea thoe the fact they can get the job for the next year but the way he does his hair makes him a bit too good and I don’t want it getting cut out for a long period I think it

cute

cute story about how the Easter bunny came to be. it's a Christmas story, third in the series. you should read the first two before this one. my 11yr old was uninterested by the middle, so I continued listening on my own. great for a bit younger... maybe ages 8-10. it does have a mean Elf and some topics that might be too much for too young - like lying to get ahead, blaming others for your circumstances, running away when you're overwhelmed. they are resolved by the end.

this, just like the other books in the series, is a large amount of build up throughout the book, for the last chapter or two to have all the culmination.

Didn’t know I needed a follow up to the Girl Who Saved Christmas!

I read these books out of order, starting with The Girl Who Saved Christmas, followed by A Boy Called Christmas. I enjoyed both, thinking TGWSC was a wonderful conclusion, but was pleased to see the story continue. However, the reuse of character motives prevented me from giving it a full five stars. Outside of William Joyce’s Guardian series, this is my favorite modern Christmas series. The audio quality was good, and the narration was enjoyable. I can’t comment on pronunciation since I read the others, and this is how things were pronounced in my head, but there was a glitch where a section repeated in one chapter.

Father Christmas and Me

My son and I enjoyed this story (the third book in the series) a lot. However we had a few issues with this recording... First of all, we both found it quite annoying that several names were pronounced differently between this book and the one before it (The Girl Who Saved Christmas). I understand that they were read by 2 different readers - but the pronunciation of names should not change. Secondly, there seems to be a technical glitch in the recording. In chapter 12, the recording repeats a big section of the preceding chapter. It’s quite weird, and caught us off guard - but we listened to the whole 2 chapters again and the same thing happened! Other than that, we enjoyed the performance a lot.

A clever tale w/ lots of fun, magical words but...

Sometimes scary, sometimes sad..kind of like life.
My only real criticism is the very abrupt, fact timing between chapters. It made it difficult to break between them. Not sure who or why this aspect was so poorly edited.
Otherwise we really enjoyed the weave of this story between worlds and characters!

A great ending to the trilogy

The only thing I didn’t like about this was that when one chapter ended, the next one started almost immediately. There needed to be 2-3 seconds between the chapters.

I will definitely be re-reading these books every December.

great family listen

Great book in a family listening series leading up to the Holidays. Make it a new tradition.

Grumpy story

Too many bad, unrealistic things happen before the “good guys” win. I kept “hoping” it would get better, but it kept dragging on.

political commentary not christmas magic

a wall to keep humans out
shouts of lock him up
caging people up
the Easter Bunny says Make Easter Great Again
no reason to end the series like this.
thoroughly disappointed

Really annoying to listen to

The narrator goes from whispering to shouting constantly, so I’m trying the volume up and down the entire time. Too bad they didn’t record this book with either of the narrators who recorded the first two books. This was almost unfinishable!