Description: The Action Storybook Bible invites families with children ages 8 and under explore God’s redemptive story together. From the sleek and amazing creatures God created at the beginning of the world to the powerful kings who reigned over ancient Israel to Jesus’s gift of eternal life for you and your family—God has a beautiful and exciting plan for the world. Where do you fit into that plan? How are the truths found in God’s Word reflected in your life?
This Bible storybook features 15 episodes highlighting key milestones in God’s story, packed with dozens of scenes—combining stories from God’s Word with brand-new captivating illustrations from Brazilian master-artist Sergio Cariello, illustrator of the bestselling The Action Bible. Discover your family’s place in God’s redemptive story and together put your faith into action!
Interactive features include:
Fifteen episodes loaded with over 350 brand-new illustrations from master-artist Sergio Cariello.
Short and easy reading for all ages. Take turns telling God’s redemptive story!
The Life, Faith, Action! feature wraps up each episode and helps your family recognize how God is moving through each story, discover how that relates to your daily lives, and feel inspired to put your faith into action.
Heroes Hall of Fame index, where you can look up your favorite Bible characters and discover their stories!
My Thoughts: As an Action Bible for younger children, the images in this book are fantastic (they're fantastic for older kids too, but the story is a bit more simplified). The colors and detail draw the eye and there is plenty on each page for a child to spend time looking at and many of the images can spark further conversation.
However, the actual narrative of the book is not what I had hoped for. As a storybook, I expected for it to simply be the stories, minus much of the gore and violence, that take place in the Bible. And that would have been phenomenal, giving the opportunity for younger kids to become invested in the story of plagues and Israel wondering the desert. Yet instead, the chapters group multiple stories together, sometimes leaving only one or two pages per narrative.
Doing this forced the author to give an interpretation of events (which left out a lot) rather than giving the events and then offering the parents questions to ask their kids about what they had read. Along with this, there were numerous instances where things were stated as fact when they truly were not facts. In the story about Cain and Abel, for instance, it states that Adam and Eve only had three children, which is not possible if Adam and Eve were the first people and everyone descended from them. While the implication of this reality is not something that young children need to know about, it is also unnecessary to make a statement to children that is false, when it is unlikely that a child of such a young age would question whether or not Adam and Eve had other descendants in the first place.
For younger children around 3-5, the pictures in this book and the streamlined version of the Biblical narratives are suitable for instruction. And for older children, the images would be helpful in catching their attention and allowing them to visualize the story. However, for these ages, I feel that the narrative presented leaves a lot to be desired from something presented as a Bible (even if it is a storybook version) and would caution parents to take that into consideration when deciding whether or not to purchase this for their children.
I have provided an honest review after having received a copy of this in ebook form through Litfuse.
