Archives (page 2 of 100)

August 2, 2024 / 0 Comments

The God Contest

This week’s summer re-run originally appeared on this blog in March of 2021.

This week, our middle two daughters competed in their first spelling bee, and in the weeks leading up to it, our dinner hour turned into Spelling Bee Practice, with my husband and I taking turns tossing the girls words to spell while we ate our meal (and occasionally tried to stump each other).

Why it’s so funny to misspell words, I can’t say, but it is. By the end of each of these dinners, at least one of us laughed so hard we cried and the rest of us had succumbed to various stages of helpless giggles. When I asked our first grader to spell “sting,” she stood up beside her chair and said, cheerfully, “Sting! B-E-E, sting!”

Or when Mitch playfully asked Josie (almost five) to spell her name? “J-O-something-something-E!”

But, hilarity aside, this was their first time competing, and excited as they were I know they were nervous, too. What if they lost? What if they won, and had to go on to face the next round of the competition? Standing up in front of your own class is daunting enough. What if they got up there and then forgot the “a” in “each”?

Carl Laferton’s new book, The God Contest, explores a different contest: that between Elijah and the priests of Baal (or, really, between God and Baal). This contest asked the question, “Who is the true God?” In the delightful tradition of the rest of the Tales That Tell the Truth series, The God Contest shares a favorite biblical story, but rather than treat that story as a complete entity, separate from the rest of Scripture, this book shows how the story of Elijah and the prophets points toward Jesus. The Israelites weren’t the only ones to wonder who was the true God, after all, and God settled the question once and for all not in a blaze of fire, but in a blaze of life at Jesus’s resurrection.

Alas, my daughters did not win their spelling bees, though it sounds like they each lasted a while and they sure worked hard. But God’s contest is settled: he is the victor. Yet rather than keep the prize for himself, he has given it—lavishly, abundantly—to those who trust in him. May this book point those young readers to the One who loves them so.

The God Contest: The True Story of Elijah, Jesus, and the Greatest Victory
Carl Laferton; Catalina Echeverri (2021)

Disclosure: I did receive a copy of this book for review, but I was not obligated to review this book 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.

July 19, 2024 / 0 Comments

The Wilderking Trilogy

Without meaning to, we’ve made it a habit to reread these books every few summers. And with each reread my conviction deepens: these books are some of my very favorites, and I think I can saw with confidence that my whole family feels this way. They deal in deep truths, yet they’re written in a way that remains accessible for a range of ages. And they are funny. Good gravy, are they funny.

This summer, we’re listening to the audiobooks again, as we traverse the county en route to both parks and playdates. These audiobooks are read by Jonathan Rogers himself, and I don’t think I could hear them any other way now (though I do sometimes hear daughters practicing their “watch out” cries in the hammock, or giving the Feechie battle yell as they sail down the street on their bikes). I also splurged on the new editions of the series, so those will be time-released to our bookshelves all summer long. And I can’t wait to see them!

So I thought I’d bring forth an old review of the most excellent Wilderking trilogy (which I have–because these books deserve it–reviewed more than once over the years). This particular version first appeared on Story Warren in August of 2020.

I love many moments in The Wilderking Trilogy, but one of my favorites happens outside the story, on the faces of those hearing it for the first time: it is the Moment of Revelation, when that niggling feeling that there’s something about this story, something familiar . . . But how could that be? The child’s eyebrows work athletically as she tries to place it. No, she thinks. It can’t be the gator grabble. Whoever heard of a gator grabble? And she’s never heard of a feechiemark either, let alone a feechie—those scrappy, raucous folk of the swamp. So it can’t be that.

But—ah! Here her eyebrows leap—she does know an old story about a shepherd boy, who was anointed king while a living king still sat on the throne. She knows about that boy and his sling. She knows about his five smooth stones. And the revelation bursts from her mouth:

“David! It’s like David!”

That is the beauty of Jonathan Rogers’s trilogy. Rogers overlays a faint tracing of King David’s story with the story of Aidan Errolson, a boy who gets his start tending his father’s sheep and makes his way through pasture and swamp, war and exile, to the throne of Corenwald.

Aidan is a hero in the old style—not the broken hero, flawed and resisting his fate, that is so common in stories today. I can’t think of any major flaws in Aidan’s character or any moments when he outright rebels. When conflict arises, Aidan is the first to step in with a creative solution; he volunteers first for the hardest missions. And yet Aidan isn’t too good to be true. As a character, he’s nuanced, endearing, and, above all, believable. He belongs wholly to Corenwald, and yet, I could imagine a kid like him living somewhere in our world.

In one of my favorite scenes from the trilogy’s first book, Bayard the Truthspeaker and Aidan speak privately after Bayard’s pronouncement that Aidan is the mysterious, prophesied Wilderking:

“What if you are correct?” [Aidan] asked. “What if I am destined to be the Wilderking? How should I live?”

“The same way you should live if you weren’t the Wilderking. Live the life that unfolds before you. Love goodness more than you fear evil.”

Good advice, thought Aidan, but he was looking for something more specific. He was a loyal subject of King Darrow. Surely he wasn’t destined to lead a rebellion against his king. He didn’t quite know how to ask the question. “If I am the Wilderking, how do I become the Wilderking?” . . .

“A traitor is no fit king. Live the life that unfolds before you. Love goodness more than you fear evil.”

To every question Aidan asks after this one, Bayard simply repeats his answer: “Live the life that unfolds before you. Love goodness more than you fear evil.” And so, for the rest of the series, we watch Aidan live the life that unfolds before him. That life leads him from his home at Longleaf Manor to some unlikely places, and I take heart in watching the trail that prophecy takes to its fulfillment. This year has felt at times—for many of us, I’m sure—like one long exile in the Feechiefen Swamp. Stories like this give me hope that these times of exile aren’t permanent but are, in fact, an integral part of our own plot.

All told, I have read this series four times (twice alone and twice with my family), and every time I’m struck by how satisfying the story of the Wilderking is. Nothing in it is wasted or out of place; each twist and turn is deliberate, but each feels organic, as though the whole story grew out of the soil and swamps of Corenwald. Corenwald itself is a viney, twining, living thing with a history, topography, and mix of cultures that weave under and around Aidan’s story to give it an unforgettable texture. The land extends beyond the boundaries of this story, so fully developed that I’m certain Rogers knows much, much more about Corenwald than we see in this trilogy.

I recently had the opportunity to take a writing class from Jonathan Rogers, and in it he urged us students to give our readers “something they couldn’t get for themselves.” In The Wilderking Trilogy, he gives us readers just that: a ticket to a place we couldn’t visit on our own. He gives us a feechiemark and safe passage through the swamp.

You can order the new edition of the first book (and pre-order the other two) in the Rabbit Room store or on Amazon. You can buy the audiobooks here. I don’t usually tell you what to do, but in this case, I sure will: buy the books and the audiobooks. Listen to the audiobooks, and keep the print volumes around for your readers to discover (and to marvel at the illustrations). This series is worth it!

July 5, 2024 / 0 Comments

Indescribable

This week’s summer re-run originally published in June 2020, back when my kids were so small.

Not long ago, a single spider could clear any room of our house. (I take no pride in saying that I was often the first one to leave.) One report of a spider in the play room and no one would go up there again until Mitch had presented evidence of a body. One web on the front porch, and no one would use the front door until every corner of the porch had been swept.

But now we have pet spiders—three of them. Goldie the garden spider hangs her web outside our dining room window; a wee baby spider just set up shop over a planter on the patio. And Rosie, the incredible redback jumping spider, tucked her burrito-shaped web into a crack in our raised garden bed. We visit her every day and often, to Rosie’s chagrin, the little girls hover right over her, chatting and pointing.

What changed?

We learned more about spiders. They became not a whole scary lot of bugs that run, as C.S. Lewis once unforgettably observed, like disembodied hands, but individuals: a male house spider may be horrifyingly large, but now we know he’s just hanging out in the corners of our dining room, looking for a lady friend. A garden spider isn’t spinning a web across our porch steps out of spite, but because she’s hoping to snack on a few of the bugs that try to snack on our hellebore.

Just as this shift isn’t limited to spiders (we now have snail friends and roly poly friends, and it’s all I can do to deter the younger girls from keeping ladybugs in their pockets), it isn’t limited to one book either. But if I had to choose one book that has taught us to love the world around us a bit better and to see it in a little more detail, I’d choose Indescribable.

Indescribable sits in the windowsill near our table and hardly anyone grumbles when we pull it down to read at dinner. This book is a curious mix of Scripture, scientific exploration, devotional readings, and fun “Bet you didn’t know this!” facts about our world.

Each reading looks at some incredible aspect of the world and considers, without reaching far for the connection, what that aspect says about God. The death of stars; our respiratory system; shark’s teeth—each of these topics spark wonder in us, and each of these can teach us something about God. When so many people assume that God and science stand in opposition to one another, Louis Giglio shows us that science does not inevitably lead to skepticism but can instead teach us to recognize, through even unlikely things like spiders and snails, the personality and joy of God.

Giglio has introduced us to incredible facts about whales and volcanoes and trees and snow. But he doesn’t just point at those things and say, “Isn’t this cool? Isn’t it great how this happens?”—and then walk away. Instead, he points from the tree to the Tree Maker and says, “Look what this says about him. Look how purposeful and wonderful this tree is. Enjoy it. And through it, know the one who made it.”

“The heavens declare the glory of God” (Psalm 19:1), and so do redback jumping spiders named Rosie. Rejoice.

Indescribable: 100 Devotions About God & Science
Louis Giglio; Nicola Anderson (2017)

June 21, 2024 / 0 Comments

The Little White Horse

Over the years here, I’ve reviewed so, so many books. And sometimes in the summer I like to pull past reviews back to the top of the pile, because this both:

a) lightens my summer schedule up a bit (thereby freeing me up to do things like rummage in tidepools and nap in hammocks and drive my girls all over the county to attend Fun Things) and

b) gives me an excuse to share some of my very favorite books with you (again), books that might otherwise have languished in the archives of the blog forever because they were originally published waaaaay back in, say, 2018.

So! This marks our first summer re-run, my friends, and where better to begin than with the beloved book we’re currently re-running (that is, re-reading) around the lunch table at our house? (Good news—it’s still glorious.) I hope your summer is off to a sunshiney start, and that you find moments to read on your own and with your people.

Now, without further ado—a post that originally appeared on Story Warren, back in May of 2018.

“I absolutely adored The Little White Horse.”
—J.K. Rowling

That sentence alone persuaded me to purchase The Little White Horse, a book I knew nothing else about by an author I’d never heard of. If this story fed the imagination of young J.K. Rowling, I wanted to save our family a seat at the feast.

The Little White Horse starts the way so many classics do: Maria Merryweather, newly orphaned, is delivered by carriage to an unknown relative. She is to live at Moonacre Manor with her cousin Sir Benjamin, and to her that prospect sounds simply awful.

But when she arrives she finds Moonacre Manor and the valley around it infused with the unexpected, for the country life Maria dreaded is not dull at all but rich in mystery and delight. She finds clothes laid out in her room each morning, embroidered with someone else’s name. She discovers a room in the manor where every object has some secret shut up in it. And she roves the countryside with a freedom she never had in London, exploring and building unlikely friendships.

Yet there is one blot upon this otherwise unmarred place—the wicked men of the pine wood. In her determination to learn who the men are and how they came to the valley, Maria learns something unexpected—and thoroughly unpleasant—about her own ancestors.

Like an old fairy tale, The Little White Horse assures us from the start that all shall be well and, by the book’s end, all is well—all bows are tied up neatly, all difficulties resolved. But Elizabeth Goudge keeps the route from beginning to end unpredictable: we never know what is coming around the next bend, only that it will be wonderful. And it is wonderful. This book I bought on a whim has become one of the most beloved books in our family library.

June 7, 2024 / 0 Comments

I Think I Think A Lot

Bedtime at our house involves a fair amount of bustling, some snuggling, some tooth-brushing, and a lot of talking—so much talking. I like to joke that I’m a part-time counselor these days, now that all four girls are fluent conversationalists facing challenges that grow right along with them. Often the things they worry about step politely to the side during the day, when there is so much else going on. But at bedtime these worries stride down to the footlights and demand to be heard, and so one daughter or another will drift downstairs and sidle up to one of us, hoping we’ll ask them what’s wrong.

Often, the problem is as big and as broad as this: “I don’t know how to turn my brain off!” To which I can relate.

And so I, with my houseful of overthinkers, am grateful for Jessica Whipple’s sweet book, I Think I Think A Lot, in which the main character wrestles with the fact that she just seems to think and worry so much more than her peers do. The result is a series of insights about her friends that contrast the way she thinks about the world with the way they think about it. The story serves as a fun introduction to the different ways we all think about the world around us and invites readers to recognize themselves in one or other of the characters. And to know that, wherever they land, these differences are good and interesting.

Whipple writes from her own experience with OCD, which provides a helpful backdrop for the book. And she writes broadly enough that I Think I Think a Lot can help kids from all sorts of backgrounds begin to find words for the way they see the world—and to understand better how their friends and siblings might see it differently.

At our house, I think we all think a lot. And you know what? We can glorify God in that, too.

I Think I Think a Lot
Jessica Whipple; Josée Bisaillon (2023)

Though I did receive a free copy of this book for review, I am not being paid to promote it. My enthusiasm for this book is abundant and purely voluntary.

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