Saturday, January 12, 2013

Book Review: Who's Who in Heaven


My eleven and seven year old daughter's enjoy reading about the lives of the saints, so when I was given the opportunity to review Fr. Thomas G. Morrow's Who's Who in Heaven: Real Saints for Families in Plain English, I was pretty confident that the girls would be interested in reading through this book.  The book is one that works both as a read-aloud for younger school aged children and independent reading for older children.


In Who's Who in Heaven, the reader will learn about eleven saints.  All of whom are pretty well known.  I was happy to see that this book had some of the girls' favorite saints.  Both were pretty happy to discover that St. Therese of Liseux was featured in this book.  St. Anthony of Padua, who is called upon by us quite regularly, is also found in this book.

I like the set up for this book.  Each chapter is devoted on one saint and that chapter is broken up by various subtitles making it easy to break the saint's story up in bite size pieces so the story can be read over the course of a few days to accommodate for short attention spans.  At the end of each chapter there is a reflection and several discussion questions that will get your children thinking about the lessons they have just learned from reading/listening to this saint's story.

Each chapter in this book has a single black and white illustration.  For older children this is sufficient, but younger ones might not be very content with the scarcity of illustrations.

Overall, I think the book is nicely done.  The stories are interesting and well written.  I do feel the book is most appropriate for children in the middle school age range.  You can certainly use this book as a read aloud for younger kids, but I felt it was better suited to my eleven year old than it was to my seven year old.

This review was written as part of the Catholic book reviewer program from The Catholic Company. I was provided with a review copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.  Visit The Catholic Company to find more information on Who's Who In Heaven. The Catholic Company is the best resource for gifts for every Sacrament celebration, such as First Communion gifts and Baptism gifts, as well as a great selection of limited-time Year of Faith gifts and resources.

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