By Sally Lloyd-Jones
A story bible that reads like one long, beautiful story, telling twenty-one Old and New Testament tales as chapters that all point toward Jesus.
This is the one parents tend to fall for as hard as their children do. Sally Lloyd-Jones takes the well-known stories, Creation, Noah, Moses, David, and then the life of Jesus, and tells them not as separate lessons but as chapters of a single unfolding story, each one pointing ahead to Jesus. The writing is warm and a little poetic, made to be read aloud, and Jago's sweeping, glowing illustrations give it the feel of a real storybook rather than a reference shelf. It reads beautifully at bedtime, one story at a time.
What sets this one apart is that it has a shape. Instead of a grab-bag of separate tales, the stories connect and build, so an older preschooler or an early reader gets the sense of one long story with a thread running through it, which holds attention in a way a story-a-page bible doesn't. The language is lovely, the kind you don't mind reading for the tenth time, and the art is a real draw. It suits a slightly wider age range than the simplest first bibles, which is why families often keep it out for years.