Tag: illustrated (page 8 of 50)

February 25, 2022 / 0 Comments

Chirri and Chirra, The Rainy Day

When you live with little girls (and, I presume, little boys—though I wouldn’t know and could not verify this fact), the veil between the real and imagined world is thin. The other day my five-year-old turned a pilfered paper bag into robot helmet and walked around the house, beep-booping pleasantly and intoning to herself, “I – am – a – ro – bot.”

Later that day, my eight-year-old converted her car seat into a helicopter cockpit, and I could hear her back there calling “Turn left! Turn left!” and pulling the arm rest up like a lever as she leaned hard into the turn.

They are always seeing something just beyond what I can see, something I’ve forgotten—since my own days as a little girl—how to see. And I’ve watched with mixed feelings as my older girls have begun to grow out of this. That doorway doesn’t remain open to them forever.

But books like Chirri and Chirra remind those of us who have crossed that threshold what it’s like on the other side, even as they give younger readers fuel for their imagination. Chirri and Chirra are two sisters who ride their bikes to simple destinations that somehow transform into magical ones. A trip to the sea becomes a trip under the sea; a trip the basement becomes a trip to an enchanting underground land. In this book, a ride in the rain leads Chirri and Chirra to the Rainy Day Cafe, a cozy place designed for watching the rain fall.

Written and illustrated by Kaya Doi, these books are brilliant little windows into childlike play. With their lilting language and soft illustrations, the books themselves seem magical—there’s something in them that inspires new adventures amid the most ordinary settings.

This post is part of my “Hooray! We’re launching a book!” blog series, celebrating the upcoming release of Wild Things & Castles in the Sky—a book I both contributed to and, alongside Leslie & Carey Bustard, helped edit. Today’s post features a book that is part of a series described bewitchingly in Wild Things.

Chirri and Chirra: The Rainy Day
Kaya Doi; trans. from Japanese by David Boyd (2021)

The Good King's Feast, by Elizabeth Harwell | Little Book, Big Story

February 11, 2022 / 0 Comments

The King’s Feast

“We’re meeting in the office after the service, right?” This from an elder who caught up with me before church.

Ah! Were we? I had lost the thread of an email exchange between our family and our church leadership, and—I’m not proud of it—completely forgotten that today was the day our youngest daughter had her “coming to table” interview.

I don’t know how your church handles this, but at our church, the elders meet with each child when they’re ready to take communion and, over a dish of peanut M&Ms, ask them a few questions about communion: do they know what communion is, who Jesus is, and so on. Our oldest daughters did this all together when we joined our church a few years ago, but Josie had been too little then and has spent the years since being patiently prayed over each Sunday by a pastor as we all filed forth in line to receive communion. But now she was five: she understood things. This was her moment! And I had completely forgotten about it.

“She remembers what communion is, right?” I whispered to Mitch during the call to worship. He gave me an “I think so?” shrug. We’d talked to her about it—weeks ago. Surely she’d remember . . . right?

Because the truth is, this is a strange ritual we engage in each Sunday: we eat bread and drink a thimbleful of wine (or grape juice) and look peaceful and meditative about it, as though eating the flesh and drinking the blood of God was not gruesome at all, but glorious. I found myself wondering—does this make sense to a child?

But in The Good King’s Feast, Elizabeth Harwell explains it beautifully, in a way that translates one of the mysteries of our faith into words and images that make sense to young readers. She addresses communion from a child’s height, narrating in the voice of a storyteller meeting a child at the very start of the story. Beginning with the Passover, she works her way through different Old Testament markers that help make sense of both the significance and the symbolism of communion. She does this gradually, patiently, until that first glimpse of the familiar bread and wine feels refreshing, each link of the chain joining with a satisfying click.

Though we didn’t have this book the week of Josie’s interview, I was so grateful when I found The Good King’s Feast a few months later and we were able to continue our conversation about communion at home. I was grateful, too, that she calmly munched her way through her interview, one M&M at a time. The next week she received her own bit of bread, plucked her own thimbleful of grape juice from the tray, and joined us in the mystery as part of Christ’s family.

This post is part of my “Hooray! We’re launching a book!” blog series, celebrating the upcoming release of Wild Things & Castles in the Sky: A Guide to Choosing the Best Books for Children—a book I both contributed to and, alongside Leslie and Carey Bustard, helped edit. Today’s post features an author who also contributed a chapter to Wild Things.

The Good King’s Feast
Elizabeth Harwell; Laura Pennebaker (2021)

For the pedobaptists among us, Elizabeth Harwell’s other book, The Good Shepherd’s Pasture, is also a delightful resource!

December 17, 2021 / 0 Comments

Christmas Tapestry

When Jonathan’s father takes a job pastoring a church outside Detroit, his whole family is uprooted—transported from Memphis, Tennessee, where Jonathan had just made the soccer team, where things their church was new and beautiful, and Jonathan knew where he fit. But his family’s new church is nothing like their gleaming Memphis church: attendance is small and the building feeble and rickety.

Jonathan’s parents assure him, though, that their Memphis church looked just that humble when they’d moved there, and that his father had been hired not just to shepherd the congregation but to repair and rebuild their Detroit church as he had their church in Memphis. And so the family sets to work restoring the old church in the hope that it will be ready for their Christmas services.

And everything goes swimmingly—they’re going to make it! Until a snow storm damages the churches and sets a chain of surprising events in motion.

This is a classic Christmas miracle story, and it’s one that touches on something we’ve talked a lot about in our house this year. When things don’t go the way we expect them to, it’s tempting to look at the circumstances and protest, like Jonathan, “But how? How can God use this for good?” Even as an adult who has seen firsthand how God’s goodness to us often comes through suffering, it still sometimes sounds trite to my ears to hear that God is working all things for good when I can’t see with my eyes how he’s doing it.

But this story is a beautiful reminder that the goodness God works is often disproportionate to our suffering: Jonathan’s family labored over their church, and the damage done to it is costly, difficult to fix, and bitterly disappointing. These are real losses, and Jonathan feels them acutely. And yet the blessing God works through those very hardships is abundant and overflowing—the sort of goodness that makes the heart squeeze a bit and that makes the quick-to-cry among us lose our composure as we struggle to read it aloud. Like the gospel itself, this story sounds almost too good to be true. (And maybe this one is: it is based upon stories author and illustrator Patricia Polacco had heard told, so though she has reimagined it, there is likely some kernel of truth in this story.)

And that is part of what makes this book, like many of Patricia Polacco’s books, so beautiful: it rings true. God does work in this way—he uses the run-down and overlooked to remind us that he is always working, drawing us together and to him.

One thing to note: this book does mention the Holocaust. It is not graphic or detailed, but you may wish to read this one first and determine if it’s a good fit for your younger readers.

The Christmas Tapestry
Patricia Polacco (2002)

December 10, 2021 / 0 Comments

A Christmas Carol

I always feel awkward when I review a book I’m pretty sure you’ve already read. Each time I do it I wonder: why spend time reviewing The Chronicles of Narnia or Anne of Green Gables when you likely read both as a child? This is when my goal for this blog and the work needed to carry it out seem to be at odds with each other. Because my hope is that this blog will be a wealth of book resources—one you can rummage through at your leisure and in which you will find piles of books full of grace and truth. And what pile of grace-and-truth-filled books would be complete without A Wrinkle in Time, for example, or A Christmas Carol?

This tale of Ebenezer Scrooge’s thawing heart is a classic of classics, the granddaddy of Christmas literature. It doesn’t tell the Christmas story—as I recall, it doesn’t mention Jesus at all—but A Christmas Carol illustrates beautifully the effect of grace and goodness on a hard heart. But of course you already know that, because this story is such a part of our Christmas culture that the word “scrooge” has gathered its own meaning over the years. So what I’m here to do today, I suppose, is encourage you to read the full story (just in case you haven’t yet) and to read, specifically, this lavishly illustrated edition of A Christmas Carol.

This edition is part of Tyndale House’s “Engaging Visual Journey” series. I have already read, adored, and reviewed their edition of Hannah Hurnard’s allegory, Hinds’ Feet on High Places, which was enriched not only with gorgeous illustrations but also by the addition a biographical essay that invites readers to know Hurnard in her own, first-person words. A Christmas Carol: An Engaging Visual Journey benefits from a similar treatment. Rich with illustrations by three very different illustrators, this edition also features illustrations from earlier printings of the story, Victorian Christmas recipes for dishes like “Chestnut Sauce—for Fowl or Turkey,” a biography of Dickens, and a short anthology of other classic Christmas stories like O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi” and Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle.”

I have seen books like this go wrong by trying to make a classic feel more “relatable” or “modern,” but this one does the opposite: every addition serves to place readers in Dickens’s time period rather than trying to translate his story into ours. And by including these beautifully layered illustrations and large-format pages, this edition simultaneously opens A Christmas Carol up to younger readers without abridging or modifying the text. And it invites those of us already familiar with the story to sit down with it one more time and meet Ebenezer Scrooge anew.

A Christmas Carol and Other Stories: An Engaging Visual Journey
Charles Dickens; Jill De Haan, Millie Liu, Carlo Molinari (2021; orig. publ. 1843)

November 26, 2021 / 0 Comments

Saint Nicholas the Giftgiver

To Santa, or not to Santa—that was the question. We were new parents raised with Santa-rich holidays, and that first Christmas with our first baby, that decision sat before us, ours to make. But how? The Christian literature on the subject was plentiful and opinionated: those for Santa argued against Christmases devoid of magic and wonder; those against claimed that inviting Santa to the party was akin to lying to our child. And so we sat in the middle, pondering (between diaper changes) how this momentous decision would affect our daughter into adulthood and whether she would, one day, discuss it with a therapist.

I overthought it, of course. It wouldn’t be a Rosenburg decision if I hadn’t.

It seemed to us that there must be a third option. Beneath the commercial Santa of our youths there was a saint of legend—a man imbued with the ability to defy time and space and celebrated long before Black Friday was a thing. Beneath the legend, there was a historical man—but who was he? After lots of research and conversations with friends, we landed on “not to Santa”—but to Saint Nicholas!

And so on December 6, Saint Nicholas Day, the shoes in our house mysteriously fill with chocolate coins, and we curl up before breakfast with a book about Saint Nick. Right there at the start of Advent, we discuss who Nicholas was and what’s up with Santa. Then we spend the rest of Advent talking about Jesus.

Ned Bustard’s new release, Saint Nicholas the Giftgiver, captures that whole spectrum of Nicholas’s story, from faithful Christian bishop to man of myth and legend. In this sweet rhymed book, Bustard—illustrator of Church History ABCs and Every Moment Holy—shares Santa’s origin story with the youngest readers and shows how the historical man became “Good Saint Nick.” This is a both/and book: we can tell our children the story of Saint Nicholas and we can celebrate Christmas in a way that holds Jesus at the center. Bustard’s linocut illustrations make this book feel both historical and magical. In his “Note From the Author,” Bustard writes:

“Both history and legend portray for us a man moved to action by his faith. The apostle John wrote that we love because God—the greatest Giftgiver—first loved us. And it was God’s generous love that filled Nicholas with gratitude, prompting him to respond with love and generosity to others.”

This is the heart of Nicholas’s story—not the presents, the traditions, or the stockings, but his faithful obedience to the true giftgiver. Saint Nicholas the Giftgiver gets this just right.

Saint Nicholas the Giftgiver
Ned Bustard (2021)

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.

Tag: illustrated (page 8 of 50)

Chirri and Chirra, The Rainy Day

The King’s Feast

Christmas Tapestry

A Christmas Carol

Saint Nicholas the Giftgiver

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