My family has a shared practice of ‘comfort reads’. When we’re feeling low, overwhelmed, at sixes and sevens, or even just tired, we grab a book we have deemed a ‘comfort read’, find our preferred spot to relax, surround ourselves with hot beverages and blankets, and read the treasured book in our hands. We each have different criteria and selections for comfort reads, but there are several that we hold in common. Books that are gentle, that cause us to think, that give us comforting phrases, that have characters with whom we identify- all common criteria. Laura Alary has given us a new comfort read in Rise: A Child’s Guide To Eastertide. In this book, she masterfully combines gentle phrases with things to ponder, wrapped in familiar concepts that help us reimagine what it means to live as Easter people.

Rise: A Child’s Guide To Eastertide is the latest installment of the Circle of Wonder series, a liturgical year resource set that includes Look! A Child’s Guide Guide to Advent and Christmas, Make Room: A Child’s Guide to Lent and Easter, and Breathe: A Child’s Guide to Ascension, Pentecost, and the Growing Time. This book beautifully describes how Easter is a season, not just a day, gently leading readers to new ways of living as Easter people. There are five sections, themed Into The Garden, At The Table, On The Beach, In Everything, and Easter People. In each section, Alary explores aspects of Jesus’s life and ministry through familiar lenses, while gently introducing new ways to view them. Because Easter is a time of celebrating Jesus’s resurrection from the grave, parents and those that lovingly spend their time with children often find children raise questions about death, dying, and the loss of loved ones. Through expertly crafted phrases, Alary speaks to the questions we all have about death and dying, offering ways to acknowledge loss and ways of understanding how God is working in and through our very human emotions. Reading this book is like being wrapped in a hug; comforting. You are left with new understandings as well as a newly found nuanced view of what it means to live in the Easter season.

You absolutely need at least one copy of this book. Yes, it can be the touchpoint reading as you open your time with children from Easter to Ascension. You can use it as part of your Bedtime Stories and Prayers ministry. You can put it in your lending library and send it home with families, alongside a stuffy for them to snuggle with and pray with. You can take the sections and spend your midweek ministry session exploring them further. It would be even more powerful to do so intergenerationally; set up potluck dinners and pull one of the main points and a wondering question out of each section for people to discuss over food. (Turn them into table tents, spread the tables with butcher paper, and pop jars of crayons on the table so the people can draw and write responses as well as talk about them.) I would love to make a Saturday Art Session for families, putting out canvases, watercolor paper, chalks, and tissue paper so people could respond to the wondering questions posed throughout this book. As a parent, I like to put out small bundles of books for my children to peruse seasonally- this book has already been added to my Easter box. This resource has so many uses- you cannot go wrong with picking up this new jewel of a book.