illustrated Archives | Page 39 of 50 | Little Book, Big Story

July 17, 2015 / 10 Comments

The Sword of Abram

For years I have followed a Bible reading plan that lures me into the nooks and crannies of Scripture. Without it, I’d be tempted to stick to the well-lit spaces: Ephesians, Luke, the Gospels. With it, I find myself greeting the day with a reading from Numbers, or forced to reckon with the strangeness of Daniel. I want the easily understood—Judges refuses to be that. But my reading plan takes me through Judges anyway. And through these lesser known, unsafe stories, I learn to love new facets of the Lord: I see his steadfastness in a new light, or come to understand a little more the way he works in lives of his people.

The best story Bibles dive into some of these nooks and crannies. But I haven’t seen many picture books that move beyond the top five Bible stories: Genesis, Noah, Daniel in the lion’s den, the Christmas and Easter stories.

N. D. Wilson (author of 100 Cupboards) plunges off the well-trodden path of children’s Bible stories and writes about Abram, not yet Abraham. This isn’t the story of Abraham’s journey to fatherhood, but of Abram’s journey to faith. It’s a small book filled with battle and striving, and through it Wilson brings to life passages of Scripture often overlooked by adults and unfamiliar to children. Forest Dickison’s illustrations convey a sense of movements, and his paintings pair with Wilson’s language to craft a story of how the Lord works in a human heart.

The Sword of Abram is a part of N. D. Wilson’s series, The Old Stories. I have yet to read the other two books in the series, but have high hopes for them, given the favorable review of In the Time of Noah on Aslan’s Library. Have you read any of the other books? What did you think?

The Sword of Abram
N.D. Wilson, Forest Dickison (2014)

June 26, 2015 / 2 Comments

The Giving Tree

Once, a friend sat on the couch with Lydia, reading The Tale of Benjamin Bunny. Like many of Beatrix Potter’s books, Benjamin Bunny is a meandering story, so while he read and Lydia listened, I went back to making dinner and chatting with his wife. But then, something from the next room caught my ear: it was Lydia, saying, “If my mom was reading this, she would be crying right now.”

I stopped, mid-chop, and burst out laughing. She is mostly correct: I have never cried during Benjamin Bunny, but I do cry, freely and unattractively, during most of the books that we read. Our daughters have learned to wait patiently until I’m ready to go on (this can take a while in books like The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe or The Railway Children), even patting my arm in a comforting way or asking, “Are these happy tears? Or sad ones?”

Usually a book elicits one response or the other. But occasionally, we read a story that hits the space right between happy and sad and draws enough of each emotion into my tears that I don’t know how to answer that question. I’m happy because the story is beautiful and because something about it rings true, but I am sad because there’s a bitterness to its truth. It feels like the coming of fall.

The Giving Tree is one of those books. You’ve almost certainly read it or had it read to you as a child; maybe you’ve tried to keep your own voice from trembling as you read it aloud to your children. The Giving Tree is a beautiful story of sacrificial love, one that demonstrates for us what it looks like to give until you have nothing left to give—and then to give away even that nothing.

I had read this book as a child; I had enjoyed it as a child. But rediscovering it as a parent was like peeling back a fresh layer of an onion: the story was sharper than I remembered, sweeter, and, yes, it made my eyes water.

The Giving Tree
Shel Silverstein (1964)

June 19, 2015 / 4 Comments

The Green Ember

My husband and I called work assignments back and forth as we unloaded the minivan after church. “You get the baby, I’ll get lunch,” “I’ve got the bag!”—that sort of thing. I was halfway up the front steps when I saw the box.

“Never mind!” I called. “No lunch today! I’ve got books!”

We did eat lunch that day—I even made it—but while we ate cold leftovers in rumpled church clothes, I unpacked the box at the table. My family watched the proceedings with varying degrees of interest. How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare, Caught Up in a Story—boring Mom stuff (clearly influenced by a recent Read Aloud Revival binge). Treasuring Christ With Your Hands Full—again, Mom only. But then:

“Oh, what is that book about?” Only the baby remained uninterested—everyone else huddled around me to study the cover of The Green Ember. My husband murmured reverently, “It’s beautiful.”

I dropped everything else from my reading list and started The Green Ember that afternoon. Written by S. D. Smith of Story Warren, The Green Ember tells the tale of Heather and Picket, two rabbits set adrift in a corrupted wood by the loss of their home and family.

Someone somewhere (where was that quote?) called this “a new story with an old soul,” and I can see why: in the tradition of classics like The Chronicles of Narnia or The Princess and the Goblin, Smith uses fantastic elements to tell a story that is lively and engaging but that courses with good, old-fashioned virtue. Though the story has allegorical moments, it is not a strict allegory, and in that way Smith presents a beautiful picture of a community living in the hope of restoration, looking forward to the day when harms will be mended and the world made right.

A word of warning, though: the opening chapters are intense. If your family is up for that, awesome! Proceed. But if your kids are anything like mine, you might hold off on this one for a few years lest they have nightmares. Those opening chapters gathered steam slowly for me—I wanted to know more of the story earlier in the book—but once the train left the station, the ride was wonderful. And by the end?

No spoilers. But the book rocketed to the top of my favorites. May that be endorsement enough.

The Green Ember
S. D. Smith, Zach Franzen (2014)

Good news! You can also pre-order a copy of the prequel, The Black Star of Kingston!

May 22, 2015 / 2 Comments

Prayer for a Child

Sometimes, you go out looking for books. You pillage the shelves of the used bookstore or library, book list in hand, or you find in the free boxes outside either place books you didn’t know you were looking for, books whose covers call to you or whose titles ring some bell in your memory and so you bring them home for closer scrutiny.

Sometimes you find books at library book sales, where the room is too small and the patrons surprisingly aggressive (these are books and they are dirt cheap and people really, really want them), but you have found so many diamonds in the rough this way that you stand outside the library at 9:58 on the first day of each sale with two dozen or so other dedicated hopefuls. When the doors open, you try to be civilized.

Sometimes, you go out looking for books. And sometimes, books find you. You receive them as a gift, or they show up in a box of odds and ends from your mother-in-law who is cleaning out shelves and closets and found a few things she thought you might like. If you had not just heard the book read on Read-Aloud Revival, you might have overlooked it, but you did just hear it read and so you recognize it for the treasure it is when you open the box.

That is the origin story of our copy of Prayer for a Child. This is a short book, perfect for a small child, and it walks through a simple prayer line by line, illustration by illustration, touching on the different parts of a child’s life that are worth thanking the Lord for but that are so easily overlooked: parents, shoes, a favorite chair. The author’s emphasis on gratitude and the lilting cadence of the prayer make this a lovely read aloud.

I will be honest, though: Elizabeth Orton Jones’s illustrations didn’t appeal to me at first (even though she won a Caldecott medal for them). It wasn’t until I looked closely at the illustrations and realized that they encapsulate an aspect of childhood in the 1940s that I came to appreciate the historical depth that they add to the book. The dated look of them underscores the fact that this prayer is timeless, as applicable for children of our era as it was for the children of World War II.

And that is a beautiful truth: when it comes to gratitude, our kids need to hear it from children of other times and places, where things weren’t (or aren’t) as plentiful as they are here and now. They need us to show them what it looks like, to lead them along gently into those moments of reverence, when we see a good thing and tilt our chins upward in delight over the God who made such a thing—a bumblebee fumbling with a long-legged poppy, or the sun through a little sister’s golden hair.

Our children need prayers like this one—we need them—to help us notice and name the good gifts our Father has set out before us.

Amen.

Prayer for a Child
Rachel Field, Elizabeth Orton Jones (1944)

May 15, 2015 / 3 Comments

Half Magic

Four children find a coin that grants wishes, but it only grants half the wish. Adventure and hilarity ensue.

The plot of Half Magic might strike you, as it did me, like the sort of thing that E. Nesbit might write, and that is no accident. In the book’s opening chapter, Edward Eager gives E. Nesbit’s books a cheerful salute, then goes on to tell a story that borrows from the best parts of her work while introducing its own original charm.

Eager’s characters are as warm, quirky, and fallible as Nesbit’s Bastable or railway children, but they feel less like carbon copies than like well-crafted, energetic homages to her characters. The narrator’s voice and the enchanting plot also tip their hats toward Nesbit, and upon finishing the book, I found myself with two very compatible desires: I wanted to read more Nesbit, and I wanted more Eager as well.

I love all of that about Half Magic. But the best part is this: while reading Half Magic, I found it hard to get through more than a few pages at a time because I could not stop laughing out loud. The last book to affect me this way was T.H. White’s The Once and Future King (also affectionately mentioned in Half Magic), but Eager’s book featured more comedy in a shorter span of time, so I was left holding my breath through certain passages, in the hope that I might make it just a little further before my eyes watered so much as to make the text illegible. Then I collapsed, caught my breath, and began again.

I do not want to wait to share this book with my family. But I will. I’ll save it for a few years: I think the girls will laugh a little harder at the jokes then, but the wait may kill me. We’ll see.

Half Magic
Edward Eager (1954)

Tag: illustrated (page 39 of 50)

The Sword of Abram

The Giving Tree

The Green Ember

Prayer for a Child

Half Magic

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