The Girl Who Saved Christmas

by Matt Haig, Chris Mould (Illustrator)

Overview

The entire family will rejoice at this whimsical story of the first child to ever be gifted a Christmas present! A perfect read-aloud this holiday season. From the author of A Boy Called Christmas–now a Netflix movie starring Kristen Wiig, Maggie Smith and Henry Lawfull!

Amelia Wishart was the first child ever to receive a Christmas present. It was her Christmas spirit that gave Santa the extra boost of magic he needed to make his first trip around the world. But now Amelia is in trouble.

When her mother falls ill, she is sent to the workhouse to toil under cruel Mr. Creeper. For a whole year, Amelia scrubs the floors and eats watery gruel, without a whiff of kindness to keep her going. It's not long before her hope begins to drain away.

Meanwhile, up at the North Pole, magic levels dip dangerously low as Christmas approaches, and Santa knows that something is gravely wrong. With the help of his trusty reindeer, a curious cat, and Charles Dickens, he sets out to find Amelia, the only girl who might be able to save Christmas. But first Amelia must learn to believe again. . . .

"Matt Haig has an empathy for the human condition, the light and the dark of it, and he uses the full palette to build his excellent stories." –Neil Gaiman, Newbery-winning author of The Graveyard Book

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781524700478
Publisher:	Random House Children's Books
Publication date:	10/16/2018
Series:	Boy Called Christmas
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	19,637
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.60(h) x 0.90(d)
Age Range:	8 - 12 Years

About the Author

Matt Haig is an internationally bestselling author whose novels for children and adults have been translated into twenty-six languages. His children’s books have won the Nestlé Smarties Book Prize, the Alex Award, and the Blue Peter Book Award, and been nominated several times for the Carnegie Medal and the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize. His most recent book, the bestselling A Boy Called Christmas, was praised by Stephen Fry as “the most evergreen, immortal Christmas story to be published for decades.” He lives in Brighton, on the south coast of England, with his wife and two children. Visit him at matthaig.com and follow @matthaig1 on Twitter.
 
Chris Mould began studying art at the age of sixteen and has gone on to become an acclaimed illustrator of children’s books, including Matt Haig’s A Boy Called Christmas. He lives with his wife and two children in Yorkshire. Visit him at chrismould.blogspot.com and follow @chrismouldink on Twitter.

Read an Excerpt

Do you know how magic works?

 

The kind of magic that gets reindeer to fly in the sky? The kind that helps Father Christmas travel around the world in a single night? The kind that can stop time and make dreams come true?

 

Hope.

 

That’s how.

 

Without hope, there would be no magic.

 

It isn’t Father Christmas or Blitzen or any of the other reindeer that make magic happen on the night before Christmas.

 

It’s every child who wants and wishes for it to happen. If no one wished for magic to happen, there would be no magic. And because we know Father Christmas comes every year, we know now that magic—at least some kind of magic—is real.

 

But this wasn’t always the case. There was once a time before stockings and Christmas mornings spent excitedly ripping off wrapping paper. It was quite a miserable time, when very few human children had any reason to believe in magic at all.

 

And so, the very first night that Father Christmas ever decided to give human children a reason to be happy and to believe in magic, he had a lot of work to do.

 

The toys were in his sack, the sleigh and reindeer were ready, but as he flew out of Elfhelm, he knew there wasn’t enough magic in the air. He traveled through the northern lights, but they were hardly glowing at all. And the reason for the low magic levels was that there wasn’t much hoping going on. After all, how does a child hope for magic to happen if they’ve never seen it?

 

So that very first visit from Father Christmas nearly didn’t come. And that it did happen is thanks to one thing. A single human child. A girl, in London, who believed in magic totally. Who hoped and hoped for a miracle every single day. She was the child who believed in Father Christmas before anyone else. And she was the one who helped Father Christmas, just as his reindeer were starting to struggle, because the amount she hoped, while she was lying in bed that Christmas Eve, added light to the sky. It gave Father Christmas a purpose. A direction. And he followed a thin trace of light all the way to her home, at 99 Haberdashery Road, in London.

 

And once that was done, once he had placed a full stocking of toys at the foot of her bug-ridden bed, the hope grew. Magic was there, in the world, and it spread among the dreams of all children. But Father Christmas couldn’t fool himself. Without that one child, that eight-year-old girl called Amelia Wishart, hoping so hard for magic to be real, Christmas would never have happened. Yes, it took elves and reindeer and the workshop and all of that, but she was the one who saved it. The dream of magic.

 

She was the first child.

 

The girl who saved Christmas.

 

And Father Christmas would never forget it. . . .

Editorial Reviews

If somewhere in the afterlife Roald Dahl met Charles Dickens and they cooked up a new Christmas tale, it couldn't have much on this fleet, verbally rambunctious, heart-stealing follow-up to A Boy Called Christmas…

The New York Times Book Review - Maria Russo

"If somewhere in the afterlife Roald Dahl met Charles Dickens and they cooked up a new Christmas tale, it couldn't have much on this fleet, verbally rambunctious, heart-stealing follow-up to A Boy Called Christmas." —The New York Times

"With a little bit of naughty and a lot of nice, this Christmastime yarn is a veritable sugarplum." —Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

If Roald Dahl and Charles Dickens cooked up a Christmas tale, it might resemble this spry story.

New York Times Book Review

10/01/2017
Gr 4–6—Eight-year-old Amelia toils as a destitute chimney sweep in 1840's London, desperately hoping for a miracle that can heal her sick mother and save her family. It turns out that magic and hope alone are what makes Christmas happen, and Amelia's unconditional belief empowers Father Christmas enough to perform his first Christmas. Two years later, Father Christmas's kingdom has been destroyed by giant trolls and the orphaned Amelia is a prisoner in a horrible workhouse. She no longer believes in magic—without her, Father Christmas cannot continue, so he loads his sleigh and heads off to London to find her. The story is fast-paced and playful, peopled with interesting characters and unique details such as the "Barometer of Hope" and the invention of the "Tell-Elf-Home," but what sets this story apart are the genuine emotions exhibited by all—loss, fear, sadness, and, ultimately, love. VERDICT An inventive Christmas-themed origin tale that is a pure holiday treat.—Sada Mozer, Los Angeles Public Library

School Library Journal

2017-07-17
Orphaned chimney sweep Amelia loses everything, including hope, leaving Christmas in dire jeopardy. This companion to A Boy Called Christmas (2016) is written in the same jolly tone and similarly decorated with waggish illustrations. Eight-year-old Amelia, who once brimmed with hope, was the very first child to receive a present from Father Christmas. But because trolls destroyed the sleigh, the only thing Amelia received last Christmas was to be tossed into a workhouse run by the odious Mr. Creeper. Now starved and worked relentlessly, Amelia has run out of hope, the essential fuel for the magic of Christmas, and consequently Father Christmas can hardly get the sleigh off the ground or stop time long enough to get presents delivered to all the children of the world. It becomes Father Christmas' mission to find Amelia amid the peculiar streets and humanity of London. This tale is classically atmospheric; in fact, Charles Dickens himself makes some very important appearances. With an abundance of chortleworthy silliness ("Vixen bit Comet's ear for sniffing her bottom"), supreme wisdom is bestowed: trolls aren't very smart, but they don't hate Father Christmas; Flying Story Pixies will do anything for wonderful new words; and most importantly, hope is born in the simple act of kindness. The human cast appears to be an all-white one. With a little bit of naughty and a lot of nice, this Christmastime yarn is a veritable sugarplum. (Fantasy. 6-13)

Kirkus Reviews