2 out of 4 stars
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Who wouldn't love a story set in the North Pole with an elf for a protagonist, flying reindeer, and multiple Santa Clauses? Apparently, I wouldn't. I chose to read The Elf Brief: Book One of The Magi Charter by Jordan David because I enjoy a well written magical fiction (give me an Alice Hoffman any day) and I was hoping for an inventive festive read. That said, I felt as if the author wasn't truly invested in his or her novel until about the eighth chapter, however I finished the novel because the concept was an intriguing one.
The story begins with meeting Noel, who lives in the North Pole complex and works with a thousand other elves each in various departments which as a whole help make Christmas happen for children all over the world. The hat an elf wears denotes his or her department and elves are very proud of their distinctive hat. Noel is a reference elf who wears an orange hat and helps make the naughty and nice lists in the List Department. He is soon asked by Santa Christo to perform a special assignment. He is to record the transition of power taking place in the North Pole.
In this world, Santa Claus is a series of human men who serve for about a hundred years before they step outta the suit so to speak and hand over the reindeer reins to the new Santa. The Elf Brief: Book of The Magi Charter tells the tale of the transition between Santa Christo retiring and the recruiting and preparation of the next Santa. The department of the North Pole complex that deals with finding the new Santa is the First Contact Department (referred to frequently in the text as the FCD department [redundant wording, right?]) and the two characters who begrudgingly let Noel tag along are Cinnamon Bun and Yule Tide.
The crew is sent to Sydney, Australia by confusing pseudo-magical means to recruit and convince the man Samuel Locke to step into Santa's shoes. Set up like a job offer they go to talk him into the position. There is a bunch of will-he-won't-he-do-it that lasts for a while which I found confusing during the read because after Yule had performed a bit of “magic” to convince Samuel to be Santa he does accept the job. I think the author was attempting to put more conflict into this aspect than showed up in the work because Santa Christo decides that the only way to convince Samuel further is to go with the FCD and Noel when they go to collect him after his two weeks to get ready.
At this point, plot line veers away from Samuel Locke and the Santa story line into Noel trying to unlock the secrets of the North Pole. This gets a little creepy because who has ever heard of angry Christmas elves, right? But Cinnamon and Yule (along with the rest of the FCD) get kinda thought police all over Noel. They don't want him learning anything about what their department does because of how elves and the memory of their human lives/the human world play a part in the productivity of the North Pole.
There is an ineffective and a basically unnecessary spy named Silver Bells that they send to intimidate him and a power hungry bully named Mistletoe Green who may or may not be the head of the FCD (Santa Christo says Mistletoe is the “self-appointed” head of the FCD but at the same time says that Santa himself is the head of that department). Anyway, I found it disconcerting that the Christmas elves of the FCD were so oppressive and that there was so much time spent having the tertiary characters afraid of being kicked out of service when I felt like there wasn't enough energy spent fleshing that theme out.
So in this world, elves are humans that were recruited by elves to become elves that serve for two hundred years before retiring to the Retirement Village or return to the human world. If you've got that, stay with me. When they are recruited they are adults but the age that they are as elves remains confusing and distracting until chapter 9. There is a whole question I have of whether the height of an elf is an indication of age that I have yet to understand. An explanation early on would have saved me a lot of hair-tearing.
In chapter 7, Samuel Locke is collected along with his saint bernard, Brandy. What little we know of the man is that he wears sunglasses and likes surfing. It took me aback that the FCD elves seem so angry with and distrusting of their new Santa even though they found and chose him.
It is in chapter 8 that it seems the author starts writing. There is a good description of the power transfer between Santas, and Noel gets to become Samuel Locke's Santa assistant. When Samuel Locke becomes Santa Nicholas he gets certain powers to help him with the Mission. Noel and Sam get to do a bunch of training for Christmas Eve. There are different departments to meet in preparation for the trip and because of that a lot of the elf world is explained in better detail. A good amount of time is spent with reindeer training and with the Flight Control department. The ending is just what we all would know it would be. Christmas Eve is upon Noel and Santa Nicholas and they have their aerial adventure.
There are other characters in the book and other things happen but I just don't feel like they are really worth mentioning. As a reader, I felt that the other characters like White Snow and even Noel's best friend Spices were put in as filler. None of them seemed to be more than a basic character sketch and a lot of the character and plot conflict (a whole thing with books) turned out to be a non-issue by the end.
That being said, there were a few good points of the book. I liked all of the cutesy names and some of the descriptions toward the end of the novel. The extra abilities the Santas had were well thought out and pretty clever. It makes me think that the author would have enjoyed writing a sci-fi/mystery more.
At the end of the day, I feel it is a lot to ask a reader to read 7 whole chapters of a 12 chapter book to get to the actual story. There were enough typos, structural and grammatical errors, misused and wrongly capitalized words, plot confusion, and never-ceasing ellipsis to give me a frustration headache. I didn't see any evidence of professional editing in this book. On top of that, the Mission is referred to from the start but not explained until the end, so that I was constantly asking myself what it actually was. As for the title, the word magi was never mentioned and a charter came up on only one page (119) and wasn't explained, which makes me wonder what the saga will be going off of in the future since the base of the story wasn't clearly framed.
When all is said and done, I feel like the author did try to create the world of Christmas in a unique (albeit sinister) way and therefore I give The Elf Brief: Book One of The Magi Charter two out of four stars. I won't be the one to bash imagination, especially when I was given a whole new way to see a fantasy world. In spite of the laborious reading, I think that someone out there would enjoy this book although I am unsure of the audience it is meant for, my bet would be young adult readers or true holiday junkies.
Happy Reading All
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The Elf Brief
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