By Ruth Sanderson
Seventy-six Catholic saints, one to a spread: a full painted portrait on the left, a short life on the right. It's a big reference book children open to a favorite rather than read cover to cover.
Ruth Sanderson paints each saint as a single portrait, one to a page, in a style pulled from Renaissance painting, icons, and illuminated manuscripts — gold leaf, deep color, steady faces looking straight out at you. On the facing page is a short life: the dates, the feast day, what they're the patron saint of, and what they actually did. Stephen is here, and Catherine, and Lawrence, and so is Teresa of Calcutta, so it runs from the first century all the way to the twentieth. Up front there's an introduction on how a person becomes a saint at all, and a glossary in the back. It's the size and shape of a picture book, but it works like a reference shelf.
For a child around Communion or Confirmation age, this hands over seventy-six real people to get to know, most of them awkward or stubborn or in trouble with somebody at some point. A child choosing a Confirmation name has a genuine use for it, since it's a browsable book of candidates, and that's rare in a gift. And because it's built as short entries with one portrait each, a child who won't sit still for a long book can still work through it a face at a time, over weeks. It's a reference book with real paintings in it, the kind that stays in a house long after the picture books get boxed up.