By Helen L. Taylor
John Bunyan's Christian allegory, more than three centuries old, retold with children as the travelers: a boy named Christian shoulders a heavy burden, walks out of his doomed city, and doesn't stop until he reaches the King.
Christian is a boy with a weight on his back that nobody else can see and he cannot put down. A man called Evangelist tells him the truth about the place he lives, the City of Destruction, and points him toward a far-off gate. So Christian goes. The road is a real adventure road. He sinks in the Slough of Despond. He climbs the Hill Difficulty. At the Cross the burden rolls off his back and he cannot stop laughing. Down in a valley a monster called Apollyon blocks the path, and Christian has to fight him. He walks the Valley of the Shadow of Death. He and his friend Faithful are arrested at Vanity Fair, a town that is one endless shopping fair and hates the two of them for not wanting anything in it. Giant Despair locks Christian in the dungeon of Doubting Castle until he remembers he has been carrying a key called Promise the whole time. Then the Delectable Mountains, and then a river he has to cross to reach the city waiting on the other side.
Taylor did the one thing that makes this work: she made the pilgrims children. Bunyan wrote a grown man's journey in seventeenth-century English. Taylor kept his road, his monsters, and his order of events, but she shortened the sentences and lowered the age of everyone walking it, so a nine-year-old follows a boy their own size. It reads as an adventure with a map. Short chapters, a new named place in nearly every one, and a monster or a giant or a trap in most of them. It is also about as openly Christian as a children's book gets while still telling a real story, and that is a big part of why families reach for it. The meaning lives inside the plot, so it comes up in conversation on its own.