Tag: illustrated (page 28 of 50)

The Easter Story, by Brian Wildsmith | Little Book, Big Story

April 14, 2017 / 1 Comment

Brian Wildsmith’s The Easter Story

I love celebrating Holy Week. I love it in the same way I love the anticipation of Advent, and the long meditation of Lent. I love living, day by day, the story of our Savior’s last week as a mortal man.

On Sunday, the triumphal procession. On Thursday, the Last Supper, Passover, the washing of feet. On Good Friday—oh, Good Friday—the Crucifixion, that startling ending and the piercing sorrow of it. The stunned silence of Holy Saturday.

And then: that first Easter morning, when the women gathered at Jesus’ tomb, come to minister to him only to find the tomb empty and angels waiting to bless them with the best news, the news that Jesus lives!

At our church on Easter morning, our pastor calls out to us at the start of the service, “He is risen!” And we, sleepy congregants who may have woken before dawn to come to the sunrise service before this one, call back, “He is risen indeed!” Our pastor doesn’t chide us for a lack of enthusiasm, but calls again, louder this time, “He is risen!” And we, still attending to fidgety children and crumpled bulletins, call back, “He is risen indeed!”

And again, still louder, “HE IS RISEN!“ Finally, we get it. Our hearts are warm, the tears gathering in some of our eyes as the joy in our pastor’s voice reaches us. The noise of it, the delight in our voices as we respond is palpable, the room filled with the good news as we call back, louder this time, “HE IS RISEN INDEED!”

At home, we have spent the week walking through Holy Week in Scripture and in our favorite picture books. We have read books that recount Jesus’ last week plainly, in gorgeous language straight from the Bible, and we have read books that come at the story from a fresh angle—from Peter’s perspective, from Petook’s, or in the case of The Donkey Who Carried a King or this book, Brian Wildsmith’s The Easter Story, through the eyes of the donkey both blessed and humbled by the honor of carrying the King of Kings into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday.

Brian Wildsmith’s version is beautiful, the illustrations intricate and illuminated with gold accents that cry happily, “This story is something special! Attend to it!” We have had this one in our collection for years, and the joy evident in its creation and contagious in its reading makes it a fitting selection for this week, this Holy Week that is almost at its end.

May you all have a jubilant Easter, filled with delight and song and celebratory chocolate, for he is risen indeed!

The Easter Story
Brian Wildsmith (1993)

Michael Hague's Easter Treasury | Little Book, Big Story

April 7, 2017 / 0 Comments

Michael Hague’s Family Easter Treasury

I made it my mission this year to find unusual Easter books, books that play variations of Easter’s main themes rather than hammer out the melody over and over. That is, I went looking for books that don’t recount the events of Holy Week in the usual way.

We have a number of books that do that and I love them, but reading them repeatedly for the forty days of Lent can deaden the power and beauty of the resurrection story a bit by Easter, so this year, we tried something different: in Lent’s early weeks, we’ve been reading from books like At Jerusalem’s Gate and this one, Michael Hague’s Family Easter Treasury. We’ve been savoring variations upon that main theme, whetting our appetite for the rich feast of books to come.

This book is similar in style to The Children’s Book of Virtues (also illustrated by Michael Hague). It contains accounts of the Easter story, but they’re tucked into a well-chosen collection of fairy tales, folk tales, poems, hymns and stories that all touch on Easter in some fashion. The stories we’ve read so far have been beautiful—”The Maid of Emmaeus,” especially, and “The Selfish Giant.” We’ve savored them slowly as a part of our homeschool mornings, and they’ve already become a valuable part of our Easter library.

And Easter is coming! Soon we’ll pull out the old favorites and set this new favorite aside, but right now, this treasury is just right.

Easter Treasury
Michael Hague (1999)

March 31, 2017 / 1 Comment

Love is Patient, Love is Kind

And just like that, she turned one.

Josephine, who yesterday was swaddled like a fleece burrito and cuddled into the crook of my arm, who chuckled in her sleep and spent her days with me in the corner of our bedroom, where we’d tucked the glider and a stash of books and chocolate—she turned one.

I used to think that at some point, my children’s birthdays would grow less shocking. But they haven’t. Every one catches me off guard: I look at the baby who is clearly a one-year-old now and I do the math and I know that a year has passed. She army crawls around the room, adores her sisters, and hasn’t spent a day napping in my arms in months, but I’m still bewildered. I make plans for her birthday and still I wonder: When did that happen?

(I anticipate a similar sense of befuddlement in May, when Lydia turns nine. Nine. The single digits! Where are they going!)

I think, though, that that confusion is part of what I love about celebrating my daughters’ birthdays. For a moment, I am brought up sharp and reminded that time is passing, and what seems like an repeated loop of breakfast, lunch, dinner, sleep is a loop that rolls us steadily forward. This is a season to be savored because it will not last, and because we move through it closer to the day when Jesus returns.

Another thing I love about their birthdays: buying them books. My quest for a book that suits them right now, at this particular birthday, but that will also grow with them over the course of the coming year, is one I delight in. I start months before their birthday, checking books out potential candidates from the library, reading Amazon reviews, weighing the pros and cons of this board book over that one, before I land on what seems like the perfect birthday book.

For Josie, that perfect birthday book is Love is Patient, Love is Kind, a sweet rendering of that passage in 1 Corinthians 13—you know the one. We so often hear it quoted at weddings, but it’s a beautiful picture of life in the body of the church that translates readily to life in the heart of a family, as the youngest of four sisters. Naoko Stoop’s illustrations are charming, and the board book format makes it a just-right first birthday book for our littlest daughter.

Because, really: One? When did that happen?

Love is Patient, Love is Kind
Naoko Stoop (2017)

March 24, 2017 / 2 Comments

At Jerusalem’s Gate

I finally figured out how to use our public library.

It’s been there for years—I frequented it myself as a child—and I have taken my daughters there semi-regularly since Lydia was a baby. But my approach to checking out books was haphazard at best: throw books that looked interesting in our book bag and sift through them when we got home. Return them a few months overdue, pay fines, and sheepishly avoid the library for a while. Every so often I would reserve a book, forget to pick it up, and sheepishly dodge the library again.

Something changed a few months ago, though, when I sat down to the online catalog and reserved every book I had ever bookmarked on Instagram. Every few days after that, I got an email announcing that some new book was in, waiting for me. These were the best books, the ones usually not on the shelves because their hold lists were so long they just moved from drop-box to hold shelf to somebody’s home and so on.

We found The Princess in Black this way. We discovered Mustache Baby. We checked out every available John Hendrix book this way (sorry, Whatcom County John Hendrix fans! We’ll bring them back soon, I promise). We learned that our library cards max out at seventy-five books, and that our county actually has a pretty respectable Easter selection.

You already know how to use your library, I’m sure. I am extremely late to this particular party. But I love this party: we go to the library weekly now, collect our box full of books and go home happy, not having entered the children’s department once. In this baby-and-toddler season of life, that’s a welcome development.

But about those Easter books.

At Jerusalem’s Gate was one of my favorite library finds this Lent, a title I remember from long ago on Aslan’s Library. In a genre where every other book seems to be titled either The Easter Story or What is Easter?, Nikki Grimes gives us something unexpected: a collection of poems that branches off from the familiar story of Easter.

Grimes walks the line between Scripture and speculation gracefully: each poem explores some aspect of the story that has caught her attention—the meaning of Judas’ name, the story of Pilate’s wife, Mary’s response to the Crucifixion—while making it clear in each poem’s introduction that these are the author’s thoughts, not canon. She invites the reader into her own musings and expands the world around the well-trod path of the Gospel accounts, reminding us that actual people lived the events of Holy Week—people who wept and wondered and lived the story’s beginning, middle and end.

This book is, obviously, available at our local library, but we loved it so much that I purchased our own copy (sadly, Jerusalem’s Gate is out of print, but you can sometimes find affordable copies on Amazon). It has been a beautiful part of our family’s reading for Lent, and it’s one I’ll look forward to reviving every spring.

Footnote

If you aren’t entirely smitten with this book yet, I highly recommend reading Sarah’s review on Aslan’s Library. It’s beautiful and gives a detailed look at some of the poems. You know what? You should read that review anyway, even if you’ve already put the book on hold at your library.

At Jerusalem’s Gate: Poems for Easter
Nikki Grimes; David Frampton (2005)

February 24, 2017 / 2 Comments

The Lord’s Prayer

There comes a time in every book reviewer’s life (I assume) when the book titles trickle in slowly. Sometimes, they arrive in a rush of books so beautiful that I’m left with a full and happy editorial calendar—those are the good days. But sometimes, I’m left trawling through that vague “Religion” section at the library or clicking thumbnails on Amazon almost at random, hoping there’s a new book out by a favorite author or something worth sharing with you.

I’m in that place now: there are a number of new books coming out this spring (by Jennifer Trafton! And Douglas Kaine McKelvey!), but they’re not here yet. And I have a number of books on hold at the library, but I’m not holding them yet. And so I went book-hunting on Amazon and—success!—found The Lord’s Prayer.

I have reviewed a number of Tim Ladwig’s books, and I know by now that his illustrations don’t sit quietly in the background, behaving nicely while the text tells the story. No, they spring from the mind of a storyteller: as the text tells its story in print, Ladwig tells his in pictures, harmonizing with the written word and illuminating the humor, heartbreak, or joy in each sentence.

The Lord’s Prayer is no exception: many of us have heard it recited plenty (our church says it aloud together every Sunday), and so I imagine it’s challenging to find a way to illustrate such familiar words. But by centering his illustrations around a father and daughter who set out to serve an old woman, Ladwig shows how each line of the prayer can be lived out in practice. A whole story unfolds behind Jesus’s words, and it draws them out of the realm of rote repetition and holds them close enough for us to see what it looks like to ask God for “our daily bread,” or to “deliver us from evil.”

This book quickly became a favorite among our girls. We had fun finding details in the illustrations and talking them through together (“What is she doing? Why do you think he did that?”). But Ladwig’s strength, really, lies in his characters’ faces—he gets those expressions just right, and that brings his paintings to life. A gentle look passed between father and daughter, or the grateful smile of an old woman convey as much or maybe more than plain text could.

The Lord’s Prayer
Tim Ladwig (2002)

Tag: illustrated (page 28 of 50)

Brian Wildsmith’s The Easter Story

Michael Hague’s Family Easter Treasury

Love is Patient, Love is Kind

At Jerusalem’s Gate

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