Book Review: Saint Who?

Just about every time I pick up a new book on the saints I find several that I have never heard of before.  With Brian O'Neel's Saint Who? ~39 Holy Unknowns~I met about 37 saints I didn't know existed.  I had read O'Neel's other book 39 New Saints You Should Knowa while back and I have to say that I enjoyed Saint Who? every bit as much as his previous book.

As with many books on saints that devote an entire section or chapter to each individual saint, this is a book that you can pick up and zero in on reading about the saint of your choice and not feel like you should have read the book from cover to cover.  Something I really appreciated about the table of contents for this book is that there was a little subtitle next to each saint's name so you could scan the list and see if there was a particular saint that jumped out.

The stories for each of the saints featured in this book are all well written.  I really enjoyed getting to know some of these lesser known saints, and came away wanting to know more about some of them.

This book also caught the attention of my almost eleven year old daughter.  She loves reading about the saints and kept paging through the book whenever I would put it down.  While I chose to read the book from cover to cover, she chose to scan the table of contents to see who she wanted to read about.  She was excited that Sts. Perpetua and Felicity were in this book.  She has been very interested in them since watching The Story of Saint Perpetuaand seems to be eager to read about them whenever she can.  Since I'm on the subject of writing about my middle schooler reading this book, I have to say that it's not a book I would just hand off to her and let her read from cover to cover.  There are a few saints in this book who have stories that I think are a bit too mature for her.  For example, I don't think a middle schooler needs to be reading about a saint who is listed as "The Cuckold".  So as she read through this book, I made sure she told me what she wanted to read before I let her read it just to make sure she wasn't reading anything that I felt had a more adult theme to it.  But don't mistake me for saying that this book has any kind of sordid details or anything of that nature, I just think that the stories for some of the saints are too mature for a child and I am not ready for the questions that some of the stories may evoke.

Overall, Saint Who?is another great book from O'Neel on some of the more obscure members of the Church Triumphant.

I was provided with a complimentary review copy of this book by the publisher, Servant Books, in exchange for my honest review.

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