Sneaky The Hairy Mountain Monster: A Christmas Holiday
by ReadersMagnet | June 25, 2026 | Literary Executive Review | 0 Comments
Where Wonder Lives in the Woods: A Review of Norma Fleagane’s “Sneaky the Hairy Mountain Monster: A Christmas Holiday”
There is a particular kind of children’s book that does not try to be everything at once — one that settles into its story the way a family settles into a warm house after a long drive through the snow. Norma Fleagane‘s Sneaky the Hairy Mountain Monster: A Christmas Holiday is exactly that kind of book. It is heartfelt, imaginative, and grounded in the kind of family warmth that children instinctively recognize and respond to.
From its very first pages, it invites young readers into a world of Christmas wonder, cousin adventures, and a mysterious three-eyed creature hiding just beyond the tree line — patient, watchful, and surprisingly tender.
A Cover That Earns a Second Look
Illustrator Jasmine Mills has composed a lively winter scene that accomplishes something every great children’s book cover should: it tells a story before a single word is read.
The typography is one of the cover’s most effective elements. “SNEAKY” commands the top of the page in bold, hand-lettered script with a dramatic, expressive flair that practically leaps off the surface — a visual energy that mirrors the character’s larger-than-life presence in the story.
The illustration itself rewards careful looking. Two children — a boy sprawled out making a snow angel, a girl leaping joyfully in pink boots — fill the foreground alongside a cheerful snowman. The palette is wintry and inviting: soft whites, muted blues, warm peach, and brown tones.
A Storytelling Voice Full of Heart
Fleagane’s prose is intimate, rhythmic, and anchored in sensory detail — the hallmarks of a writer who has thought carefully about what children actually notice and remember. The book opens with a clever and endearing framing device: a five-year-old boy named Blake James who declares that every fairy tale must begin with “once upon a time,” and so Fleagane obliges. It is a self-aware nod to the storytelling tradition that immediately draws young readers into a world that feels both familiar and full of possibility.
What Fleagane does exceptionally well is ground her story in the physical textures of childhood experience. Snow falls heavily and fast in the beam of the car’s headlights. A little girl stands in a parking lot and lets snowflakes land on her face and tongue for the very first time. Grandpa and Blake made snowballs with their bare hands because stopping to find gloves would have broken the spell of the moment. Only after they realized how cold their hands were that they put on gloves, and continued to throw snowballs.
These are not incidental details — they are the emotional substance of the story, rendered with an authenticity that speaks to a writer drawing from real wells of memory and affection.
More Than a Monster Story
What sets Sneaky the Hairy Mountain Monster: A Christmas Holiday apart from the crowded field of holiday children’s books is the emotional intelligence running beneath its cheerful surface. This is, at its core, a story about belonging — about what it means to be welcomed into a place for the first time, to experience something new alongside people you love, and to carry those memories forward. Makayla’s first encounter with snow is not simply a charming plot beat; it is the emotional center of the book, and Fleagane treats it with the reverence it deserves.
The family warmth woven through every page of this story feels earned and genuine. A grandmother watches her husband and grandson throw snowballs in a lighted parking lot and quietly thinks this moment is a gift from God. A five-year-old girl, freshly turned five and newly emboldened, volunteers to say grace at Christmas dinner — peeking with one eye to make sure she has not forgotten anyone at the table. These are the moments that give the book its soul, and they linger.
And then there is Sneaky. Throughout the story, he watches — from the tree line, from behind a barren oak, from the shadows near the house. He imitates the children’s snow angels. He watches them with something that, by the story’s final pages, begins to look unmistakably like longing. When the family prepares to leave, and Makayla sees him for the first time — head bowed, sad — the book arrives at an unexpected emotional beat that will resonate with children and adults alike.
The final page, which turns directly to the reader and asks “Why do you think Sneaky was crying?”, is a particularly inspired choice. It invites young readers to step into the story, to think and feel and imagine — and that is precisely what the best children’s literature does.
Jasmine Mills’ interior illustrations merit equal praise. Throughout the book, page backgrounds shift in color to mirror the emotional register of each scene — warm pinks for the gentle opening, icy blues for the airplane and the first snow, deep lavender for the nighttime snow angel sequence, golden oranges and soft greens for cozy indoor family moments. It is a thoughtful, cohesive design language that gives the book a visual rhythm and makes each page feel distinct.
Sneaky’s repeated appearances in the margins and backgrounds of illustrations — always watching, never intruding — build a quiet visual thread that pays off beautifully in the story’s final moments.
It is a book that earns its “once upon a time” on every page — and one that leaves young readers with a warm heart and, perhaps, a lingering glance toward the nearest tree line.
Get a copy of Norma Fleagane’s Sneaky the Hairy Mountain Monster: A Christmas Holiday today on Amazon.
