Book Review // The Read-Aloud Family by Sarah Mackenzie

This book is SO good. At first, for some ridiculous and (somewhat) unknown reason, I was dreading it’d be tedious and/or some sort of guilt trip, but I needn’t have worried. Once I started I gobbled it up in about two days (while camping in NV’s Black Rock Desert ;)). It’s straight up encouraging and inspiring and do-able. Everyone should read it and it’s definitely one every parent particularly should have stashed on their shelf. Or even better, out somewhere where it’s getting dog-eared and tripped over and referenced often.

The scope of the book covers various statistical points (on the importance of reading aloud and story in the life of a child both as regards education and development, etc.), but even more, it’s on shaping hearts and minds, building family bonds, shared history, and loyalty, and engendering a wide-awake, sprawling, deep vision of the world. Also (and especially helpful) lots of friendly, relaxed, down-to-earth, excellently unpreachy, from-the-trenches tips and ideas for how to actually go about it in a busy household. I don’t want to give away too many of the meaty bits or her excellent points, but here are a few gems:

“Fiction and nonfiction stories provide children of all ages an opportunity to experience what it feels like to be overwhelmed, struggle, fight, overcome, and emerge a hero. …When we read aloud, we give our kids practice living as heroes. Practice dealing with life-and-death situations, practice living with virtue, practice failing at virtue. As the characters in our favorite books struggle through hardship, we struggle with them. We consider whether we would be as brave, as bold, as fully human as our favorite heroes. And then we grasp—on a deeper, more meaningful level—the story we are living ourselves as well as the kind of character we will become as that story unfolds.”

“When I read a story with my children… the fog lifts, and I remember. I look up. I see it—that I am only one small part of a great, big, glorious world, and that the Maker of it exists—and has existed—always. That we are all part of His plan. That we have been invited to seek and follow Him, no matter what the situation. The book becomes a set of supercharged binoculars, helping us to see beyond our normal capacity.

“A story does this on its own without our having to say a word about it. Forget the whiteboard. Forget the didactic lesson. Forget the teaching points or the comprehension worksheets. When we’re telling our children the story of Jesus healing Jairus’s daughter, of curing the lepers, of raising Lazarus from the dead, we don’t need to wrap up the story with a trite explanation about how God is powerful, good, or merciful. We don’t have to add anything at all, because there it is—truth bubbling up out of the story. It is the story. When God pours down manna from the heavens, a child doesn’t need to be told that he will provide what we need right when we need it and not a moment before. We simply read the story, and our children feel the truth of it in their bones. This happens with true stories that are literal accounts (such as stories within the Gospels, or historical narratives), as well as true stories that aren’t meant to be literal at all (such as a myth or fairy tale).”

Plus, she’s got a plethora of tingly quotes tucked all throughout. Like this nugget:

“Fairy tales say that apples are golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found out they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.” G.K. Chesterton.

Or this one:

“When she was hardly more than a girl, Miss Minnie had gone away to a teacher’s college and prepared herself to teach by learning many cunning methods that she never afterward used. For Miss Minnie loved children and she loved books, and she taught merely by introducing the one to the other.” Wendell Berry, Watch with Me

Good, eh? Now off ye go to check it out and be sure to let me know what you think! ;)