For many years, I never ate eggplant. Every time I had it in a restaurant, it was pithy and bitter and overly chewy to the point of making a dish inedible. I avoided dishes that even had eggplant as an ingredient. Too easy to ruin things with such a nasty vegetable. Then, one evening I had an eggplant dish that was not only not ruined, it was delicious. And here’s the weird thing–eggplant was the main ingredient.*
Christian morality messages are like eggplants–in anything less than skillful hands, they can ruin any book they’re put in. Max Lucado breaks the mold by writing children’s books which are not only undeniably Christian, they are tolerable even for someone who avoids Christian morality messages as if they were a tough and bitter vegetable. This is the second of his that I’ve read, and the second I’ve liked enough to buy, so he’s two for two.
The message of this book is that no matter whether or not you come from famous or proud ancestry, you are just as important as everyone else. It’s a cute message, uplifting and direct without being overly preachy, and the tale is told with cute drawings of the puppets who are most of the main characters. I generally can’t swallow the Christian “God made you in his image” idea, because I know full well that my mom’s uterus made me, with a little help from my dad. But in these books, the puppets really were made by someone, the puppet maker, a ruggedly handsome dude who looks like he could be felling trees in Oregon or maybe shilling paper towels.
The word-to-page ratio for this book isn’t bad. It’s a little too slow for the under-two set, but if you had a 3-5 year old who liked to have books read to them, this is a decent choice.
*The eggplant recipe that changed my mind was at a restaurant in Kyoto that took advantage of the eggplant’s natural sponge-like abilities and served eggplant drenched in garlic and olive oil. It remains my favorite way of preparing eggplant. I also still refuse to get eggplant in restaurants, because eggplant still ruins a lot of dishes.
