illustrated Archives | Page 35 of 50 | Little Book, Big Story

January 29, 2016 / 5 Comments

The Complete Brambly Hedge

Late pregnancy and winter. Those two forces lean heavily on both my shoulders, keeping me mostly content to nap and read my way through January, one volume of Sherlock Holmes stories at a time. But every now and then, a breeze sneaks in the door when I let the cat out and it smells like life, little and green. Sometimes, that smell inspires me to bundle little girls into winter coats and froggie boots and take a stroll through the neighborhood, where forsythia buds stud certain lucky branches and the puddles look blue in the morning light.

Sometimes, that happens. The rest of the time, there’s Sherlock Holmes, tea, and fleecy blankets.

Oh, and Brambly Hedge. A few months ago, I asked folks in the Read-Aloud Revival forum for their favorite book recommendations from past episodes of the podcast, and the response was amazing—like asking a room full of kindergartners their favorite color and receiving a response that includes every color known to man and a few not yet invented.

That forum thread cost me a lot of money in new books—really excellent new books that wound up in everyone’s stockings at Christmas (Sarah MacKenzie compiled the list of recommendations for a “Best of Read-Aloud Revival” post on her blog, so you can see for yourself how great some of these recommendations are!).

One of the clear favorites among readers at our house was Jill Barklem’s The Complete Brambly Hedge, a collection of stories about English mice living in a hedge near a stream and having all kinds of cozy and seasonally charming adventures, perfect for reading together with tea and fleecy blankets. Barklem illustrates the stories in Potter-esque watercolors, complete with cutaways that show the mices’ homes in detail: these were easily our favorite pages, and we took our time poring over them (and wishing that we were smaller and lived in tree stumps).

From the moment I opened this book I knew that my daughters would love it, but I was pleasantly surprised by how much they loved it: Lydia and Sarah now answer to Shell and Primrose and Phoebe (the poor third daughter who ends up being Olaf to their Anna and Elsa) is Shrimp. They have taken these mice into their hearts and adopted them as their own—the best seal of approval they can give.

Brambly Hedge
Jill Barklem (1980)

January 15, 2016 / 0 Comments

Read-Aloud Bible Stories

You know what reading to a two-year-old is like: if a book is about cows or kittens or is written by Sandra Boynton, I find I can usually make it through three or four pages before Phoebe tugs it out of my hands, closes it on my fingers, or wanders off to climb on something.

But the volumes of Read-Aloud Bible Stories are not about cows or kittens, and they are not written by Sandra Boyton: they are about Jesus and the Bible. In them, Ella Lindvall tells the stories of Scripture in the most basic yet enchanting way imaginable, and when I read them to Phoebe on the morning of her second birthday, here is what happened: she listened. She cuddled up to me as I read all five stories, and she listened. Lydia and Sarah, too, inched closer to us as I read, and all three were disappointed when we reached the end and had to go eat birthday pancakes for breakfast (theirs is a hard lot).

Read-Aloud Bible Stories: great story bibles for toddlers! | LIttle Book, Big Story

By the end of the book, the stories’ magic had worked on me, too: Lindvall doesn’t grasp for big theological ideas here, but tells the familiar stories of Zaccheus or Blind Bartimeus in a warm and welcoming way. She draws lessons from the stories that appeal to the smallest readers (and to those of us grown-ups still willing to admit that we need reassurance sometimes that God hears us, too).

I haven’t found many Bibles geared toward toddlers that are worth sharing here on the blog—it’s hard to capture the truth and beauty of Scripture in three stanzas of rhymed verse, and you can only appropriately add so many cows and kittens to beloved Bible stories—but Read-Aloud Bible Stories are absolutely worth sharing. We promptly ordered the second volume (Merry Christmas, Phoebe!) and look forward to collecting the rest of the set over the next few years.

Read-Aloud Bible Stories
Ella K. Lindvall (1982)

January 8, 2016 / 0 Comments

Twig

For some time I’ve been in the habit of telling our daughters stories before bed. These usually center around three sisters whose names are uncannily like those of our daughters, and whose adventures resemble things that happened to our daughters that day. But there is always a twist: if they hold a tea party in the back yard, a dragon comes to visit. If they lose a first tooth or start school or stay inside all day because of the rain, some dose of magic deepens the story and makes their day somehow enchanting. Some of these twists are, if I’m perfectly honest, pulled straight from the pages of whatever book we’re reading. But the girls don’t seem to mind, and my imagination isn’t exactly sharp by eight o’clock at night.

Stories like Twig capture that blend of the real and the imagined that appeals to my sleepy daughters. Something magical happens when an author taps into a child’s imagination and draws out a story so wondrous, so childlike, that reading it is uncannily like watching our children invent worlds in our living room. AA Milne had a knack for capturing this: the stories in Winnie-the-Pooh are written with all the clarity and ingenuity of an adult, yet they capture the element—whatever it is—that makes them so clearly the invention of a child.

Elizabeth Orton Jones (Caldecott award-winning illustrator of Prayer for a Child) writes of the adventures of a young girl named Twig in a way that captures that mix of ordinary life and the imagination. She tells of fairies and cockroaches, talking sparrows and chatty neighbors, in a way that kept my daughters wide-eyed and enthralled as we read. I don’t know if this book would appeal to most boys, honestly, but for my girls, meeting Twig was like meeting a kindred spirit in the pages of a beautifully illustrated book. They’re already hungry for sequels.

Twig
Elizabeth Orton Jones (1942)

December 18, 2015 / 8 Comments

Good King Wenceslas

I once sang “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” in a high school choir. We all dressed in black and walked down the aisles with battery-operated candles, singing eerie, anticipatory harmonies to our parents and loved ones.

I loved the song (and still do), but I had no idea what I was singing about.

I think that is often the case with Christmas carols: so many of them retain the beautiful language of centuries passed, filled with words that have dropped out of our vocabulary and doctrine. Though we know the words by heart, it is hard to take them to heart without a dictionary. The carols become so familiar as we sing that we forget to listen to them.

Good King Wenceslas takes a familiar carol and slows it down: though I like to sing the words as I read this book to my girls, the illustrations draw out the story behind the song and surprised both my husband and me. Oh! we thought. That’s what the song is about!

It’s a beautiful story about a servant king, and Tim Ladwig’s illustrations bring rich and lively details to a song whose story sweeps over the heads of many children (the line “Good King Wenceslas looked out on the feast of Stephen” always perplexed me when I was small). I found this one at a used bookstore mere days after reading about it on Aslan’s Library and knew I had found a book worth returning to Advent after Advent.

Good King Wenceslas
John M. Neale, Tim Ladwig (2005)

December 4, 2015 / 5 Comments

The Best Christmas Pageant Ever

A good story prepares the soil of a child’s heart for the seed of the gospel. When choosing books to read to my daughters or share with you, I think about that a lot: is this a good story? Will it nourish children and plant in them a longing to see the King return and the world remade? Or does it give them a cramped perspective that this life—with its illness, injury, and evil—is the best that we can hope for? That there is no magic after all?

What I don’t often think about, though, is which stories fed me as a child. I read voraciously but I did not read deeply, so many of the classics featured here are new discoveries for me. All of the Christian literature is new, and because I only dimly recall reading Goosebumps and The Babysitters’ Club, it rarely occurs to me to wonder which stories the Lord used to soften my heart toward him.

But a few years ago, my mom gave me a well-loved copy of The Best Christmas Pageant Ever—my own copy, revisited annually throughout my childhood. I read it again for a dose of nostalgia and discovered instead the gospel, embedded in a story I’d loved because it was funny and, in its own way, irreverent.

Because the story is so delightful and unexpected, I don’t want to tell you much about it. Perhaps I’ll tell you that it approaches the question of who does and doesn’t belong in the church with humor and grace, and that it will almost certainly make you laugh and, later, cry. And I’ll tell you that I plan to read it to my daughters this year, in the hope that this story will soften the soil of their hearts so that, when the gospel’s seed is sown, its shoot will flourish.

The Best Christmas Pageant Ever
Barbara Robinson (1972)

Tag: illustrated (page 35 of 50)

The Complete Brambly Hedge

Read-Aloud Bible Stories

Twig

Good King Wenceslas

The Best Christmas Pageant Ever

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