I Think I Saw Santa Claus. By Adam Wallace. Illustrated by Srimalie Bassani. Silver Dolphin Books. $10.99.
A cute idea significantly marred by inept versifying, Adam Wallace’s I Think I Saw Santa Claus will be a lot more fun for young children just learning to read than for adults trying to read to them and being forced to stumble over subpar attempts to write in rhyme. Some of those attempts result in forced language, as in “I’m so excited” being paired with “the lights are all lighted” rather than “lit.” But most of the time, the issue is simply one of Wallace being unable to create lines that scan, or unwilling to take the time to do so: “People are singing. Presents are under the tree. / There are so many magical things I can see!” One easy change for the first of those lines: “People are singing. We’ve gifts by the tree.” Almost every page is poetically off-putting: “I race ’round the corner. It was him! I know! / But all I can see are footprints in snow.” That’s an unusually simple fix: just add the word “some” before “footprints” and the verse works.
Thankfully, the unfortunate laziness of the writing does not fully diminish the charm of the story, which takes place two days before Christmas and involves a little girl becoming convinced that she just saw Santa walk past her house – which shouldn’t happen, because he needs to be at the North Pole putting the finishing touches on everything for the holiday. The unnamed girl narrator rushes to tell three of her friends about the sighting, and Wallace expects kids to be thoroughly in tune with pop-culture slang, because he has her exclaim excitedly, “Oh my lanta” – which adults are required to understand as a reference to a phrase form the TV show Full House, and if they (or, for that matter, kids) don’t know or watch that program, that’s just too bad.
Anyway, the four children – who have interchangeable personalities but, thanks to Srimalie Bassani’s pleasant illustrations, different appearances – spend several pages trying to discover whether Santa really is in town: “We examine the footprints as close as we can,” and yes, that should be “closely.” After a while, the kids locate Santa doing some ice fishing, and try to find out what is going on: “‘What are you doing here?’ Maddie asks the big guy. / ‘Is Christmas still on? Are you still gonna fly?’” (Yet again, the lines do not scan. Simple fix: “‘Why are you here?’ Maddie asks the big guy.”)
Santa does not really offer much of an explanation: he’s “just testing to make sure that everything’s right,” seeking out cookies, measuring chimneys, and so on. But why he’s in this town is an unanswered question – one that even the youngest readers are likely to ask when encountering this book, so adults should be prepared to come up with a reasonable or at least true-to-fairy-tales answer.
The real high point of I Think I Saw Santa Claus turns out to appear only after the kids locate and talk to Santa and after he shows them his newly dry-cleaned suit and gets back the keys to his newly serviced sleigh: the kids get to meet his reindeer (“I can make them appear!”) and get an actual ride in his sleigh as he takes it for a test run before heading back to the North Pole to load all the toys and prepare to take off for his yearly distribution of delights. Like the rest of I Think I Saw Santa Claus, this scene is just a touch offbeat and just a touch unusual: the book is fine for very young children as one entry among the inevitable flood of seasonal cutenesses. The illustrations, pleasant but undistinguished, work well with the tale, and the underlying mild amusement will keep very young readers engaged, if not necessarily enthralled, by the goings-on. I Think I Saw Santa Claus would have worked much better as prose, but it’s really not bad at all in the form in which it was actually created. It could have been verse.
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