Genre
Audience
Author’s Worldview
Catholic
Year Published
2024
Themes
Reviewed by
A.R.K. Watson
It is difficult to know where to begin to educate a child on the faith, even the vocabulary alone eludes many adults. Schoh and LaVoy have managed to make a book that is part activity book and part theology book that can be tailored to multiple levels of childhood development.
“Seek and You Will Find” focuses on each of the seven sacraments of the church. Each page shows a visual of what the sacrament looks like and includes a sidebar of challenges which are images that the child is prompted to find.. This provides a natural way for the adult to introduce words like “chasuble, mitre, and crozier.” The text explaining the deeper mysteries behind the sacraments is in short speech bubbles that can be left out if your child is particularly distracted that day or included if they are showing interest.
A second page after each sacrament goes into even greater detail about the meaning behind the actions. Younger kids might need you to skip this page but as they get older and have deeper questions this book will prove a useful resource. The commentary on the sacraments is provided by five or so different child-characters who display a good range of racial diversity so that almost any child will find a character they can identify with. One of them is even in a wheelchair. This is also useful if you don’t want your toddler to point and stare at the first person that they see in a wheelchair.
During Mass this book is especially useful as the child can be encouraged to look around their own church for the items they find illustrated in the pages.
It makes a great gift to children of multiple ages and for multiple occasions. If the child is about to attend a wedding, witness a sibling’s baptism, or undergo first communion themselves, this would be an excellent thing to read to them to help them prepare. If you are looking for something to passively read to children however, you’ll be doing yourself and the child a disservice. The greatest strength of this book is its ability to be tailored to the child’s level of interest. Older children might find the seek and find games overly simple but will be more interested in the deeper theology and vice versa. This book is definitely going into my family’s bag of quiet toys to bring to mass.
