Tag: picture book (page 30 of 40)

Sidney and Norman, by Phil Vischer | Little Book, Big Story

August 7, 2015 / 1 Comment

Sidney & Norman

Are you familiar with Phil Vischer? In the unlikely event that you’re not (as one of the original creators of VeggieTales, his work is hard to miss), I’d like to take a moment to explain to you why I hold him in such high regard.

In a time when many Christian artists simply knock off secular stuff and fill it with Christianese, Phil Vischer provides—through JellyTelly, What’s in the Bible?, and his children’s books—something new, wildly creative, and smart.

Have you seen What’s in the Bible? No? Go watch an episode now. I’ll wait.

You’ll notice that the writers of What’s in the Bible? don’t talk down to kids, but work steadily through the entire Bible, as though they think the Bible is something that kids can and should know from start to finish. They do not shy away from tricky questions like, “Why did the Israelites have to kill everyone in Canaan?” but instead answer them with honesty, delicacy, and humor (where appropriate, of course), an approach which appeals to children, yes, but also to adults. My husband and I simply love watching this show with our daughters. (We cannot say the same of Dora the Explorer.)

So, Phil Vischer tackles projects that are high-quality, ambitious and uniquely Christian. In doing so, he connects with kids in a gracious, respectful way. Which brings me, at last, to Sidney & Norman.

Sidney and Norman | Little Book, Big Story

Sidney and Norman were two pigs, but they didn’t “oink or eat slop—no, this isn’t that kind of story. They wore suit coats and went to work.” So begins the tale of two pigs who live next door to each other, but who live very different lives. Norman is organized, punctual, and well-dressed, an award-winning sort of pig. Sidney, on the other hand, just cannot seem to get his act together, no matter how hard he tries, and he suspects that all the world—Norman included—must look down on him for his rumpled tie and clumsy manner.

But when both pigs are summoned for a meeting with God (at 77 Elm Street), they find that God views them both through a very different lens.

Sidney and Norman delivers a profound message, one that lies at the heart of gospel, and one that all of us—Sidneys and Normans alike—need to be reminded of often: God doesn’t love us because we are good. He loves us because we are his.

Expect interesting conversations to flow from a reading of this book. Expect to read it again and again. And expect to find yourself looking around for another book by Phil Vischer.

One Last Thing

If you’d like to learn more about Mr. Vischer, I recommend his autobiography, Me, Myself & Bob. I like to know a bit about the authors behind my favorite books, especially when I’m reading them to my children, and hearing Vischer’s story really changed my perception of VeggieTales, as well as Vischer himself. (And it introduced me to JellyTelly, which was, in the end, a very good thing.)

Sidney and Norman
Phil Vischer, Justin Gerard (2012)

Today’s post originally appeared on April 19, 2013.

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)

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)

More, by IC Springman | Little Book, Big Story

April 24, 2015 / 0 Comments

Our public library hasn’t changed much in the last twenty-five years. I know this because I used to go there when I was a child, and I used to go there when I was a child because I’ve lived in this town since I was three.

The librarians have probably moved a few things around, added some computers, and updated the decor a bit, but I don’t see the changes: the stained glass window is just the way I remember it, and the picture books are right where they always were. I used to explore those shelves, looking for books I would love. Now I explore those shelves looking for books I would love—and, okay, that my kids would love, too—and that is how I found More.

More is the story of a magpie who collects and collects and collects, until—well, I want you to read this book, so I won’t tell you what happens. But it’s a story that addresses our bent toward hoarding and draws out, in a mere handful of words and some powerful illustrations, a friendship that is willing to stand up to a friend enmeshed in sin and stand by a friend when that sin’s consequences take effect.

This may be reading too much into a simple story—but I don’t think it is. More doesn’t close with a pat moral, but mixes these broader themes into the story gracefully, leaning on Brian Lies’s detailed illustrations to further the text on each page, so that, by the end of the book, we have laughed at and examined and delighted in the book so fully that it’s hard to believe that there’s little more than one to two words per page. Even the limited text provides a beautiful example of a case in which less truly is more.

More
I. C. Springman, Brian Lies (2012)

Tag: picture book (page 30 of 40)

Sidney & Norman

One Last Thing

The Sword of Abram

The Giving Tree

Prayer for a Child

More

Welcome

Browse

Policies

Blogroll