By Jennifer Glossop
A question-and-answer survey of seven world religions that gives each one the same kind of pages, so a curious child can lay them side by side.
It opens with the big questions — what is religion, do all these faiths believe in God, why do people worship — and then gives each major religion its own illustrated spreads: Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Jainism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. For each one you get the basic beliefs, the sacred writings, the important people and places, and the festivals and life events that mark a believer's year. John Mantha's paintings and a steady question-and-answer layout let a child open to any faith without reading front to back.
It covers more faiths than most single books, and it covers them the same way each time: the same categories, in roughly the same amount of space. That parallel structure is what makes real comparison possible. A child can lay Hinduism beside Judaism beside Islam and see where they line up and where they part ways, instead of collecting a jumble of unconnected facts. It also reaches past the usual big four to include Sikhism and Jainism, which a lot of surveys skip.