Title: Impish: The Christmas Elf
Author: Amanda McIlwain Hauser
Publisher: AuthorHouse
ISBN: 978-1-7283-2179-0
Pages: 26
Genre: Illustrated Children’s Book
Reviewed by: Beth Adams

Read Book Review

Impish is an adjective for someone with frolicsome, mischievous and prankish behavior; which happens to be the ideal name for the elf character in author Amanda McIlwain Hauser’s illustrated Christmas children’s book.

Being transported by storyline prose of bouncy, clean and clever rhyming wordsmithing, Impish: The Christmas Elf brings readers, and those being told the story, to Santa’s workshop at the North Pole. Even the illustrations are precise and artfully conceived to embellish the “clarity” of the story.

The kids, dressed in their matching pajamas, try to figure out which gift belongs to whom. Using their deductive reasoning, they match the images on the wrapping paper to the ornaments left in their stockings Perhaps a naughty trick, it ultimately was a harmless way to add humorous novelty to the Christmas present opening moments.

In the traditional way of many Christmas poetry books, Hauser’s skill of writing in a way in which children absorb the words and images exemplify her years of teaching, as well as having many children of her own. I would say practice makes for the perfect vernacular of her storytelling. All kids like to play pranks and perform espiègle behavior, so the actions of Impish are both funny and fascinating to their young minds.

Impish, working alone in her gift-wrapping workshop up in the North Pole, gets bored during the dark months the polar winters bring, so she tries to light up the lives of the people her presents are intended for with her clever antics. The family of toe- heads, illustrated so well pictorially, invite all children to join in their excitement and enthusiasm while they anxiously open their gifts, albeit amidst the confusion of having missing name tags.

At the end of the book is a wonderful portrait of the blue-eyed Impish, detailed to the max with her elf-toed running sneakers, leggings and flowing hair. She is an elf to be admired, the story of her will be enjoyed by all lucky enough to have Impish: The Christmas Elf a part of their family library.