Each Friday of August, I will be spotlighting and reviewing some of my favorite theological books for children, before we launch into part 2 of The Pilgrim’s Progress in September. Below are my thoughts on Kevin DeYoung’s The Biggest Story Bible Storybook.

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My five-year-old daughter and I finished reading this storybook Bible a couple of weeks ago. While this book is certainly an expansion of The Biggest Story, it is also quite different. While my daughter and I read the original book a few times, it never spent any time as one of her favorites. She enjoyed this Bible storybook far more, almost always asking to read one more chapter before bed and has already inquired about when we will make our way through it again.

The theological depth that one expects from DeYoung is very much present, though certainly and appropriately distilled for children. My favorite inclusion was the story of the daughters of Zelophehad from Numbers 27. Good luck finding that story in other children’s books!

The introductions to each section of the Bible were very helpful toward instructing children in the overall structure of God’s Word. The brief prayers at the end of each chapter were a great addition. And illustrations are simply wonderful. Don Clark’s style unique and captivating. He is particularly skilled in capturing the darkness of some stories without ever becoming scary to little eyes.

While I highly recommend this book, it has not taken the place of Catherine Vos’ The Child’s Story Bible as the favorite storybook Bible of both my daughter and me.

And although I enjoy DeYoung’s humor, his humorous comments occasionally derailed my daughter’s focus on the actual point of the chapter, so I increasingly found myself skipping over those lines to avoid such tangents. Of course, the description says that the book is for children ages 6-12, and children within that targeted age-range will likely not be so easily derailed. Yet parents who intend to read this book to younger children might consider bypassing such sentences as well.

Yet even with that one nitpick taken into account, any parent and child would both greatly benefit from reading this storybook about the Biggest Story.