★★✩✩✩

Book Blurb

Focus Jake. Focus on the deal, not the sexy redhead with the fiery personality to match. When Gladdie alerted me to our Santa problem, my first reaction was to beg, borrow an steal to get someone else to put on this red suit. Although with a view like this, I could muster a few hours of Santa duty as long as I get a glimpse of Santa’s Little Helper.

My Review

Santa’s Little Helper by Shaan Ranae was quite a quick little read. According to Amazon it was only 54 pages, and I read it over the course of about an hour. It was cute in its simplicity and had a theme of family values and loyalty. The main female protagonist, Santa’s Little Helper, was fiery and cute.

However, that’s about where the good things end. There were spelling and grammatical errors, tense changes and turns of phrase that seemed off and pulled me out of the story more than once. The narrative was juvenile and came from the point of view of Jake Laurel, the main protagonist who is apparently old enough to be the COO of a family owned department store. There were strange headings that let the reader know what the timeline is, i.e. “five hours later”, which seemed quite unnecessary. The story was short and really could have benefited from some additional narrative in some places. The thing I found the strangest was Jake’s absolute abhorrence of children, although he apparently has nieces and nephews. The most unbelievable thing, however, was probably the fact that Jake couldn’t even recognize his own father dressed up as Santa Claus.

I wanted to like the book and I think it could have been a great story if an editor had been involved and a little more time had been spent on developing the relationship between the two main characters instead of focusing on the irrelevant details that seemed to be there simply for comic relief. It had a very adult Miracle on 34th Street feel to it and I have a soft spot for that film, but it fell sadly short.