EASTER ELF

One of Santa’s elves joins the Easter Bunny’s elves, who are busy at their spring-training camp perfecting techniques for assisting the Easter Bunny.

Narrator Easter Elf is one of many who are practicing weaving baskets and shredding grass when one of Santa’s elves on a reindeer-training flight crash-lands at the camp. Easter Elf shows Christmas Elf around the camp, where she succeeds at the Easter-prep activities with the sort of annoying, stereotypical showoff behavior often seen in strong fictional female characters. However, she finds she can’t stand the smell or taste of eggs and appears to vomit in a patch of purple grass. The story is told through speech balloons and commands from the camp loudspeaker that include lots of puns, many of which are likely over the heads of the intended audience. Digitally created illustrations in candy-bright colors use multiple spot illustrations layered with speech balloons for an overall frenetic visual effect that is rather dizzying. The elves have the look of cartoon characters, and the narrative has the sort of fast-paced, exclamatory dialogue and quickly shifting settings seen in animated television series. Easter Elf has glasses, light skin, and turquoise hair. The other Easter elves have hair in different pastel shades, and two have brown skin. Christmas Elf has intriguing candy-cane–striped hair in a long braid and brown skin.

The overall effect of this story is similar to eating too much Easter candy—sweet at the moment but not nourishing.