Six books for a child's religious milestone, and two things have to be said before anything else. This shelf is Christian right through. And "Christian" doesn't narrow it nearly as much as you'd hope, because two of these books are Catholic, three come from evangelical Protestant houses, and one is deliberately for anybody. That's the whole difficulty of this gift. Hand a First Communion book to a Protestant family and you've handed them a sacrament their church doesn't practice. Hand a book of Catholic saints to the same family and you've done it again from the other side. So every book here says which church it comes out of before it says a word about whether your child will like it. Pick the one that matches the family and the day, write in it, and stop.
Here's the count, because the shop won't give it to you. TWO ARE CATHOLIC. 'Jesus Speaks to Me on My First Holy Communion' is Catholic to the bone — First Communion is a Catholic sacrament, the Eucharist is the book's entire subject, and the prayers at the back are the traditional Catholic ones. It is the right book for a Catholic child that Sunday and close to meaningless for a Protestant one. 'Saints: Lives and Illuminations' is the other. A library catalog describes it in as many words as brief stories from the lives of 76 Catholic saints. Venerating saints is Catholic and Orthodox practice; most Protestant traditions don't, and some object to it outright, so that book lands badly in a Protestant house. THREE ARE EVANGELICAL PROTESTANT. 'The Jesus Storybook Bible' and 'The Beginner's Bible' are both Zonderkidz, which is Zondervan; 'The Action Bible' is David C. Cook. The Jesus Storybook Bible carries one more thing worth naming out loud, because it's the book people give without thinking: the subtitle is 'Every Story Whispers His Name' and it means it literally. It reads every Old Testament story as pointing forward to Jesus, by design, chapter after chapter. That's a specific theological position, not a neutral retelling. Given to a Jewish family it hands them their own scripture rearranged into the opening act of someone else's story, which is a bigger thing to do by accident than a gift should be. ONE IS NEITHER. 'God's Dream' is Desmond Tutu, an Anglican archbishop, and it's deliberately about everyone: God is in it, no church is, and its actual stated line is that it doesn't matter how you talk to God. That's the book you buy when you don't know the family and can't ask without it being obvious that you don't know. Two Catholic, three evangelical Protestant, one for anybody. Now the part that catches people out. Zonderkidz sells the Beginner's Bible Gift Edition for 'baptisms, dedications, birthdays, Christmas, Easter, and First Communion' — an evangelical Protestant house putting a Catholic sacrament on its own marketing copy. The publishers blur this line themselves. The cover will not sort it for you and the shop assistant won't either. THE OTHER TWO THINGS TO KNOW. First, The Action Bible is a comic, fully and properly: Sergio Cariello draws for the big comic houses and he has drawn the whole Bible in panels, speech bubbles, motion lines and dramatic angles, 752 pages of it. That's the pick for the child who won't open anything else, and it means the violent parts are drawn rather than skipped — battles and swords, the plagues, David beheading Goliath, the crucifixion with the nails in it. Dramatic, not gory, and aimed at eight and up for exactly that reason. Second, age. A child making First Communion is usually seven or eight, and The Beginner's Bible is written for a two-to-six-year-old in the smallest possible words. Giving it for First Communion reads as a gentle insult even when it isn't meant as one. It's the christening and baptism pick on this shelf, for a baby or a toddler, and it's the wrong end of the shelf for the sacrament most people are shopping for. AND THE INSCRIPTION, which is the difference between a gift and a book. Write the child's name, the date, the church, and one line about why you're the one giving it. Then sign it. A milestone book without that is just a book, and they already have a Bible. On which of these are still in the house in twenty years: 'Saints' is the surest, because it's a reference book with real painted portraits in it and nobody throws those out. 'Jesus Speaks to Me' survives because it's built to — it has a dedication page, memory pages and slots for the photographs and the church program, so it becomes the place the day is kept rather than something to reread. 'The Jesus Storybook Bible' gets read for five or six years, which is a long run. Outgrown fast: 'The Beginner's Bible' is finished by about six, and 'God's Dream' is done by eight, though the point of it isn't. 'The Action Bible' gets read to pieces from eight to twelve and then put down, and being read to pieces is the whole reason to give it.