A Boy Called Christmas

De: Matt Haig

Narrado por: Stephen Fry

The first magical book in Matt Haig's festive series - now a major new film!

You are about to listen to the true story of Father Christmas.

If you believe that some things are impossible, you should stop considering listening right away. Because this audiobook is full of impossible things. Are you still there? Good.

Then let us begin....

A Boy Called Christmas is a tale of adventure, snow, kidnapping, elves, more snow and an 11-year-old boy called Nikolas who isn't afraid to believe in magic.

From the winner of the Smarties Book Prize and the Blue Peter Book award.

©2015 Matt Haig (P)2016 Canongate Books

A new holiday tradition

I adore this book. This is the fourth time I've read it; it's become a new holiday tradition. Stephen Fry is one of my favourite narrators, and he does a marvellous job with A Boy Called Christmas.

This deserves a movie adaptation.

Of all the origin stories for this mythical figure that exist in movie form, none that I know of comes even close to this. This is original and creative, yet also believable. The characters and events are all down to earth and flow seemlessly but the story does not lack magic. It's just been blended in so well. If Father Christmas was real, this is how he likely would have become the magical figure we know. The relative realism made this such an enjoyable listen, as did the likeable, reasonably complex characters. The narrator is spot-on too. Great job he did.

I only wish he had googled how to pronounce the Finnish names--especially the town names. It got a bit distracting to one who knows how, and the correct pronounciation would be easy enough for those whose first language is english. I also think that in the wring the toilet humour was unnecessary and didn't really fit in, but fortunately there was only four points where that happened. But these flaws are not big enough to lose them stars.

Anyway, great job from the narrator and a heart-felt, creative story from the author. Matt Haig seems to be at his strongest as a children's author and able to make his stories engaging for adults too. I would listen to this again around Christmas.