Wow was this book stupid and disappointing! It read like the script for a B movie. It had NONE of the heart of the original. This sequel was completely disingenuous to the ending of the first: Why does William get TWO magic wishes AND a sparkly Welcome to the North Pole song in his honor, and Brenda gets bupkiss? Brenda literally disarmed a shooter with a snowball, saving the lives of William, Bob, Santa, and Christmasaurus. Brenda the Bad@$$ should get the royal treatment FOR LIFE! Also, Brenda was a lot quicker to accept her new family than William was; if anything WILLIAM is the one who needed a lesson in learning to make space in his heart/life for someone new. The book barely addresses at all what it's like for this budding blended family to butt heads over traditions and love languages. THAT would have made AN AMAZING sequel! Instead we got... poop jokes... A lot of poop jokes... And some timey-wimey nonsense that would make even Doctor Who cringe.

ALSO, the book starts with a literal war on Christmas......... I don't consider Tom Fletcher to be a tone deaf author. Quite the opposite, I'm usually proud of how emotionally intelligent and inclusive Tom Fletcher's writing is. So where did THIS book come from?! The war on Christmas? WAR ON CHRISTMAS?!?! The conflict of this book is that there's a future ban on Christmas?!?!? Come oooon!!!

Finally, I was annoyed by the /writing/ and the misuse of words in this book. Like, someone drinking a "frozen liquid". YOU CAN'T! Those are two entirely different states of matter! You could be crunching a snowcone, or sipping a cold brew, or slurping a slushie, but you cannot call something that is not frozen solid "frozen"! Or, people were supposed to /believe/ in Santa, not /know/ that he was truly real, but in this book they treated Santa's workshop like it was just a rival toy store that had gone out of fashion, and when everyone invested in Payne's toys instead, Santa poofed out of existence. THAT'S NOT FAITH! That's economics!!! OR, Brenda initially traveled a few days into the past to stop herself from sharing Santa's magic with her greedy father, but then she changed her mind and went back to THE DAWN OF TIME to ensure that EVERY SINGLE CHRISTMAS would happen without fail...Whyyyyy?! None of the Christmases before you narced to your dad were in any danger, Brenda! They had already happened!!! AND, close the time loop, you can either have already stopped yourself and no bad future ever happened, OR you can change a future by interacting with the past, BUT YOU CAN'T DO BOTH!!! GYAH!!!!

I am raging at a children's book and hate myself right now. But please, Tom Fletcher.... There was a seed at the center of this book that /wanted/ to sprout into a good story! William, the wheelchair-bound boy who ends up in charge of Santa's sleigh, and Brenda, the former bully with a champion snowball throwing arm becoming The Winter Witch... Two people with very different pasts, traditions, expectations, anxieties, and temperaments suddenly thrust together for their first holiday as a family... This could have been the story of how, even if we all celebrate the holidays a little bit differently, we all believe in kindness and goodwill, and our hearts are big enough to hold past, present, and future simultaneously... COME ON!!!! IT WAS RIGHT THERE!!! Please, can I beg and petition for a redo? I want the family dynamics and multiple-holiday origin stories this book SHOULD have been about.

"I confess myself disappointed."