Category: Ages 8–11 (page 2 of 28)

July 8, 2022 / 0 Comments

The Elk King

When I was studying creative writing in college, there was this sort of pall over the subject of publication. “It probably won’t happen to you,” our professors cautioned. If you’re lucky, they said, you may land a story or two in a literary journal—probably a small journal, don’t get your hopes up. They pushed us to write well, and then to write better than that, but when I graduated I still felt a little vague on what was supposed to happen after we’d polished a story until there was no grit to rub off. Should we frame it? Fold it into a paper airplane and hope our aim carried it toward an interested reader?

But now, nearly twenty years later, we live in a world full of online publications, small presses, rogue print magazines, and self-publishing—all of which combine with mainstream publishers to give authors a spectrum of ways to share their stories with readers. I love this. I love that I get to have anything to do with any of it.*

Because this means that authors like Jenn Discher get to tell their stories the way they want to. In the case of The Elk King, Discher’s first book in her Tales of Animalia series, this is an excellent thing. The Elk King follows the story of Prince Draven and his family, as they live through an uncertain time: rumors of treachery and of a mysterious illness affecting the Elk surface, and it begins to seem possible that Draven may inherit the throne earlier than he’d like.

Discher has published this book with a lot of thoughtfulness and care, which gives the book a hand-crafted, carefully-tended feel to it that I love. And her land of Animalia is a gorgeous place, filled with beautiful landscapes and an assortment of talking animals, each with their own distinctive culture (her footnotes on some of these cultural details are delightful!). Jessica Linn Evans’s illustrations suit the mood of the story so well and help bring the characters to life.

For readers who already love Redwall, The Green Ember, or The Mistmantle Chronicles, reading The Elk King will feel like traveling to a beloved but wholly new place, full of characters well worth your affection. And because this book is the first in a promising series, you can read it with the hope that there is more of Animalia to explore and more to discover about Draven and company.

The Elk King
Jenn Discher (2022)

* In this case, I got to serve as copy editor for The Elk King, which I maintain makes me an extra-qualified reviewer. If I can read a book through three times and come away loving it better, that’s a sure sign it’s a book worth reading and re-reading!

July 1, 2022 / 0 Comments

God’s Attributes

That first week the schools closed, a friend sent us a care package filled with hand-cut paper petals and centers—red, yellow, orange, and black pieces that, once assembled, would make paper poppies the size of dessert plates. She thought we might need something fun to do, and she was right.

We put those poppies together, and then wrote two attributes of God on each flower—God is infinite; he is accessible; he is our Father, and so on. The girls had been learning these attributes in school but hadn’t made it all the way through the list before school closed, so we got a copy of the full list from one of their teachers and filled our poppies with these truths.

These attributes were a comfort to us during those unpredictable weeks, and they became, in themselves, answers to some of our hardest questions. Would we have what we needed, or would the grocery store shelves be sparse this week? God is faithful. How long would this all go on, and would we all come out safely on the other side? God is sovereign. How could God allow this to happen? God is omniscient—he knows so many things we cannot yet know. He is also wise and patient and merciful.

Jill Nelson’s new book, God’s Attributes, takes a deep and thoughtful look at this list of attributes and offers readings to correspond with each one. God’s Attributes is rich in Scripture and anchored by great discussion questions that encourage kids to imagine and think deeply about the material in each chapter, which makes this a great devotional for families (likes ours) that are reading to kids of all different ages. (The readings may be a little long for the youngest readers, but I think it would work well to—as I plan to—read them over a few different days or even a week and spend longer with each attribute.)

For those first few months, our poppies were simply taped to our kitchen wall. But after a while, we found that we wanted to give them a permanent place right there, in the center of our home. We hung a window salvaged from our home remodel over them like a frame and there they still are today—a reminder of who God is, and how untamable he is. Good and wrathful. Merciful and just. Incomprehensible and—always, ever, whatever happens—love.

God’s Attributes
Jill Nelson (2022)

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.

Bare Tree and Little Wind, by Mitali Perkins | Little Book, Big Story

April 8, 2022 / 0 Comments

Bare Tree & Little Wind

A few weeks ago I gave my pilea—a peppy little houseplant, with leaves that seem to float in the air like lilypads—a trim. By which I mean, I cut it down, all but an inch-high stem. (It was leggy and discolored, and this was a desperate last act to save it from the compost pile.) I watered that stump well and placed it in a sunny window, back by the washing machine, where looking at it every day wouldn’t make me sad.

And guess what? Less than a week later, I spotted a fur of green on the stump, little specks here and there. A few days later, those specks were freckles; a few days after that, they were clearly infant leaves sprung from a stump I’d almost despaired of saving.

That, dear readers, is Easter. Sometimes you have to sit with the dead stump and wonder how God could bring life out of anything so decayed. And sometimes you get to clap with delight and proclaim, “Life! Life!” It goes on whether we’re ready for it or not.

Mitali Perkins’s beautiful new Easter book shows life surviving in the unlikely, burned-out places, only to bear fruit long after new fruit seemed possible. Through the characters Bare Tree and Little Wind, Perkins tells the story of Holy Week. But she doesn’t stop at the resurrection: as Little Wind travels through Jerusalem, visiting his favorite trees and witnessing Jesus’ death and resurrection, he visits, too, with Bare Tree—a palm whose fronds, seeds, and dates have been so thoroughly harvested that all that’s left of her is a stump. But when soldiers burn the beautiful palms of Jerusalem in the years after Jesus’ resurrection, Bare Tree’s apparent barrenness becomes a hidden blessing.

Mitali Perkins (Forward Me Back to You) has swiftly become one of my favorite authors, and this book shows exactly why. It reads like a folk tale—but different. Like a traditional Easter story—but not quite. She brings a voice and perspective all her own to the story and invites us to see Jesus’ death and resurrection through the eyes of God’s creation.

And Khoa Le’s illustrations? They are gorgeous! Just as Little Wind seems to soar from one corner of the page to another, so the illustrations seem to lead one into another so that the whole book feels beautifully arranged and organically whole. Even the saddest parts of the story seem to promise life and hope. Which is true even today: our God is continually bringing life out of death and unfurling little leaves in the unlikeliest places.

This post is part of my “Hooray! We’re launching a book!” blog series, celebrating the April 19 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 an author who graced us with a powerful interview for Wild Things.

Bare Tree and Little Wind: A Story for Holy Week
Mitali Perkins; Khoa Le (2022)

April 1, 2022 / 0 Comments

Darkest Night Brightest Day

Does any holiday capture both light and darkness the way Easter does? It is a study in contrasts: the deepest depth of all human history, followed three days later by the brightest light. But I’ve noticed, in my extensive research on Easter books for children, that many Easter books tend to favor the light over the dark. The hope over the despair. And considering the audience, I think that’s appropriate.

But Good Friday has its place in the story, and rushing through it year after year can make it easy for us to forget what Jesus truly did, what he suffered, on our behalf. And so, I’m deeply smitten with Marty Machowski’s new book, Darkest Night Brightest Day, which—get this!—is really two books in one. The book’s format means that we can’t speed through the sad parts of the story to the happy ending: we have to read Darkest Night slowly, one day and a time during Holy Week. Then we pause. And then, we physically flip the book over and begin a new story—Brightest Day—that takes us from the Resurrection to Pentecost.

I love this. I cannot tell you enough how I love it.

Our old pastor once sent us home from a Good Friday service with the injunction to forget the end of the story, just for that Saturday. Think what it would have been like for the disciples, who didn’t know yet what would happen on Sunday, to bury Jesus and walk away from that tomb. To reconcile, for many of them, with the fact that they had abandoned him and now had no opportunity to seek forgiveness. Machowski’s book gives us room to stop. To close the book. To wonder, whether we mean to or not, What if that was the end of the story?

But it isn’t, and that’s the beauty of Easter. Jesus didn’t stay dead; the sun rose. The brightest day followed the darkest night, and we have hope in Christ that we will rise with him one day. What joy! And because this book takes the Easter story all the way through Pentecost, we are reminded of the hope we have through his Spirit—we are part of his continuing work. The dark night broke before the light of day.

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 an author whose books are warmly recommended in Wild Things.

Darkest Night Brightest Day: A Family Devotional for the Easter Season
Marty Machowski; Phil Schorr (2022)

Dead-Eye Dan and the Cimarron Kid, by Glenn McCarty | Little Book, Big Story

February 18, 2022 / 0 Comments

Dead-Eye Dan & the Cimarron Kid

If you’ve read Glenn McCarty’s The Misadventured Summer of Tumbleweed Thompson, you’ve heard about US Marshall Dead-Eye Dan. And if you’ve read McCarty’s Junction Tales, you’ve met Dan face-to-face. (For the record, I highly recommend that you do both of those things.) But Dead-Eye Dan and the Cimarron Kid dives deeper into the world of Tumbleweed and tells the sort of tale Eugene might have read and savored—one that might have inspired him to seek his own adventures. For this is a tale of Dan himself.

The book opens upon a mysterious man who has no recollection of his own name, how he injured his head, or why he’s stranded on the banks of the Cimarron River. Before long, his story intersects with that of a widow and her young son, and as he helps them tend to their peach orchard and fend off the local thugs, he begins to gather in pieces of his memories. He starts to remember, bit by bit, who he is and how he wound up in the wilderness.

This kind of story—the kind centered around amnesia—is painfully easy to get wrong. But Glenn McCarty gets it right, and he makes it a whole lot of fun for readers to keep half-a-step ahead of “the man” as his life comes slowly into focus. As our hero struggles to piece together who he was before his injury, the story explores a big question: “What makes us who we are?” The things that come back first belong to his body—he’s a crack shot with a rifle; an adept swimmer; he’s accustomed to life outdoors. He recovers physical skills before he gains access to his memories or even his own name. And this makes his recovery compelling.

In Dead-Eye Dan and the Cimarron Kid (in all his books, really), McCarty gets the trifecta of a great read-aloud just right: the story is a whole lot of fun to listen to (there were belly laughs all around the table as I read); it’s delightful to read aloud, especially in a gritty, gravelly, US Marshall voice (which I’m sure sounded awful, but I couldn’t help myself—the words wanted to be read that way!). And it’s built on a solid foundation: the story asks big questions and gives the characters room to work out the answers.

Dead-Eye Dan and the Cimarron Kid is a fun side adventure in the world of Tumbleweed Thompson that shows precisely why Glenn McCarty is now one of our family’s favorite authors, beloved by everyone in our house, ages five to forty-two. If you’re new to the series, you could begin with The Misadventured Summer of Tumbleweed Thompson—I wouldn’t discourage you. Or you could jump right in here, with Dead-Eye Dan, and work your way backward through the stories. However you approach the works of Glenn McCarty, you’ll be richly rewarded.

Dead-Eye Dan and the Cimarron Kid
Glenn McCarty; Aedan Peterson (2021)

Category: Ages 8–11 (page 2 of 28)

The Elk King

God’s Attributes

Bare Tree & Little Wind

Darkest Night Brightest Day

Dead-Eye Dan & the Cimarron Kid

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