By Marie-Hélène Delval
Forty of the Bible's psalms, each retold in three short sentences for the very youngest children, with soft, dreamy pictures alongside.
Marie-Hélène Delval takes forty of the Psalms and gives each one three short, plain sentences a small child can hold: a little poem about feeling glad, or safe, or scared, or thankful, and always turning to God. The feelings are the real ones. Some psalms are happy; some name being afraid or lonely, and Delval doesn't smooth that away. Arno's pictures go their own dreamy way instead of illustrating the words directly, so a psalm about resting shows up as a calm face tucked into the middle of a daisy, and a psalm about wonder as a child curled inside the crescent moon. It's a book to dip into a page at a time rather than read cover to cover.
The three-sentence length is most of why it works for children this young. You can read one psalm in under a minute and still have said something whole, which matches how long a toddler will actually sit. And it doesn't pretend a child only feels cheerful. The wonder and the worry are both here, all of it spoken to a God who's listening, so a child can pick up words for more than just the good days. It's a lovely thing to keep, too: a two-year-old meets it on your lap and a six-year-old finds more in it.