Every year, Easter sneaks up on me. I think it’s the way it slinks around the calendar, sometimes popping up before spring begins, and sometimes lingering, waiting until the end of April to make its appearance with our forsythia.
Usually, I like to smuggle a new armload of Easter books into the house each Sunday throughout Lent, arranging them enticingly on the window seat or the piano for my daughters to discover and curl up with. But this year, being what it’s been so far, Easter caught me off guard. I brought the first batch of books in on Palm Sunday, when I realized that, egad! It was already here! I brought them in all at once, and heaped them so deep on the window seat that we can hardly find room to sit down.
Which explains why my one and only Easter review is appearing now, on Good Friday.
Alas.

But at least this one-and-only Easter book is a good one—one worth looking forward to next year, even if it doesn’t arrive in time for Easter 2023. In the footsteps of the most excellent The King of Christmas, this book invites readers to meet Jesus, the King of Easter. But where The King of Christmas sent various figures from the Christmas story searching for the king, in this book the king does the searching: one by one he seeks and saves people large and small.
His mother Mary, who believed the angel’s word—
did the King of Easter find and save her? Yes!
Here at the end of Jesus’s earthly ministry, we see him gathering people to himself: Anna and Simeon, Matthew, the centurion at the cross. He is building a kingdom of people that he has found and saved—however unlikely they may seem.

This book doesn’t focus on the crucifixion and resurrection so much as it does on the reason Jesus came in the first place: to rescue and redeem his people. This perspective makes it a welcome and already beloved addition to the piles of Easter books currently entrenched on our window seat.
And to you all: may you have a somber and meditative Good Friday, followed by a joyful, exuberant Easter. He is risen!
The King of Easter: Jesus Searches for All God’s Children
Todd R. Hains; Natasha Kennedy (2023)
Disclosure: I did receive a copy of this book for review, but I was not obligated to review it or compensated for my review in any way. I share this book with you because I love it, not because I was paid to do so.