Bobby and Cindy’s parents are going to a christmas ball and they’ve arranged a very special babysitter. Uncle Nick takes them through the power cut with a story of Santa, dragons and fairies…

Upfront I must state I have great concerns about this book as it includes a number of images, which have obviously been culled from several artists (including christ card covers and a shot of the grinch), but contains no credits or copyright notice. Some images contain their own, but not many e.g. L.Burns © 1984. Even if these are out of copyright or creative commons, I’d have expected some attribution, and no illustrator is credited. As such I cannot recommend this book until that is resolved.

The author’s website is a blog with one post on housecleaning, and the email given bounced so we were not able to check this.

It is a sweet story and if I was rating on the story alone I would give it a 3. However, it really needed its own illustrator. The mix of styles and low quality web images with artifacting, sometimes tilted at odd angles, are simply distracting. There are typing mistakes (“Uncle Nicked” and “Santa Clause” are sadly spelling errors not jokes) and some of the images are over expanded and low quality.

It includes a recipe for sugar plums and the poem “The Night before Christmas” which is woven through the story.

1 star. Get an illustrator and credit your images, and it would go up. Right now I cannot advise spending money on this