Hoglets' Christmas Magic - Lynette Creswell

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Author: Lynette Creswell

Genre: Children's Fiction, Christmas.
Rating: 3.5 stars.

A cute little story about two hoglets who help Santa and make Christmas special for a little girl as well as for their own family.

Prickles and Primrose, the hoglet siblings, are helping their parents decorate the Christmas tree when they discover that the tree star is shattered. When they go out in the forest to locate a new star, they bump into Santa, who also seems to be searching something. What is Santa looking for? Will the hoglets be able to help him? Will they find a star for their tree? Read and find out.

This is a sweet story that covers many wonderful themes. Decorating the tree together as a family, helping out those in need, using your brain when stuck in tricky situations, bonding with you siblings, having an attitude of gratitude, not giving up – all good values for children to imbibe. Having the story come from the hedgehogs’ perspective is an additional novelty factor.

The official age range of the book as per Amazon is 4-12 years. But for the younger section of this age group, the story will have to be read aloud as there is quite a lot of text, though the vocabulary is pretty simple. This would work well either as a bedtime story or for a family reading session around Christmas time.

Where the book disappointed me somewhat was in its illustrations. It seemed like the illustrator drew more from their heart than to match the story. The graphics didn’t match the textual content of the story on a few occasions. Santa doesn’t look jolly even after he finds what he is looking for! Also, the page setup is such that you have text against a coloured background. On some pages, the background colour is so dark that the text becomes tough to read. Having the text in a contrasting white/cream colour on those pages would have helped. The hedgehog family is cute, and easily the highlight of the illustrations.

All in all, this is a pretty decent indie attempt. It’s a fun story that children will enjoy as it combines two of the ideas that most children love – animals and Santa Claus.

3.5 stars, which would have been 3.75 if the illustrations were better.

My thanks to author Lynette Creswell for a complimentary copy of “Hoglets' Christmas Magic”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.

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