I must confess an important bias. I am a sucker for books with textures. Give me an embossed cover and I just have to run my fingers over it, so books featuring an abundance of different textures are a treat indeed. Victoria Osteen's touch-and-feel boxed set of three My Happy Heart Books offers fur, felt, sand, wool, and other smooth and bumpy delights. Some are obvious and others are subtle and need to be "felt' out.
Betsy Day's illustrations are fine though the huge smiles are a bit "Cheshire cat'. The pictures illuminate the text well and there are some nice details, like the dogs that feature on most pages involved in the various activities. There are a couple of instances where picture and words don't match up, such as one page in Hooray for Today! where the rhyme concludes "Thank you for my food today", but the illustration shows a bathroom. And in Hooray for my Family! the dog called "Spot' is a poodle with not a spot to be seen!
Victoria's rhymes though not great are mostly okay apart from a couple of instances where the rhythm is off. For example, read the following out loud -
"Hooray! It's time to play outside!
My sandbox is so much fun!
I make pretend pies out of sand
And bake them in the sun."
Hooray for Today is the best of the set taking the reader through the day of its preschool hero, giving thanks to God for his many blessings. Hooray for my Family is similar in format but goes through each member of the child's family thanking God for them. There was perhaps too strong emphasis on the ideal family, and the book concludes "
"I'm thankful for my family.
Our family bond is strong.
When I'm with them, I feel so loved
"cause that's where I belong."
Ultimately we belong with God, and a loving family no matter how wonderful is merely a foretaste of the relationship we will experience with God in heaven.
Hooray for Wonderful Me is the most problematic of the set and the book that displays most obviously the divide between Victoria Osteen's beliefs and Biblical Christianity. As the title suggests the book is all about "Me' " my intelligence, my kindness, my joy, my health, my perseverance, my loving nature, my talent and so on. Victoria confidently claims that the child has all these things ignoring sin and its effects on our fallen world. She also talks about the goals which she assumes all preschoolers have, saying "
"God also gave me goals and dreams.
I keep them in my heart.
I know God has big plans for me.
I want to do my part."
Hooray for Wonderful Me reads like Love Your Life for the under fives and Osteen's man-centred teaching is unmistakable. Overall, despite the tactile temptations, I would pass on the My Happy Heart Books. What Christian board books would you recommend for preschoolers?
