Review of "Seeking the Lost Sheep" by Daniel Cramton

Score: 95/100 (9.5 out of 10)

It has always been an admirable and worthwhile challenge to teach children about Jesus and what his words and sacrifice actually meant. The challenge often comes from the good book's complex, nuanced nature as well as the violent and scary content that The Bible sometimes conveys (like the crucifixion, the great flood, the binding of Isaac, the plagues on Egypt, or Revelations). It can be overwhelming, uncomfortable, and confusing for children. Heck, it's overwhelming, uncomfortable, and confusing for many adults!

Well, one of the best tools we have in teaching young people about Jesus and about God's word is through beautiful illustrated works like this that break the content down in a way that makes sense and isn't so cryptic.

Seeking the Lost Sheep by Daniel Cramton is one of the best-illustrated Christian children's books we've read in years! It hearkens back to the illustration and presentation style of the KJV Classic Children's Bible (by Thomas Nelson and Seaside) that thousands of children owned in the late 80s and 90s. Only, it's even more colorful and a bit more friendly.

Seeking the Lost Sheep is part of an ambitious and admirable effort by Cramton and WestBow Press to bring the gospels to children around the world—to introduce them to the beautiful gift of salvation and hope they have in Christ Jesus. This series is projected to include a trilogy of books that focus on three of Jesus' parables: the parable of the lost sheep, the parable of the missing coin, and the parable of the prodigal son.

This first book focuses on the parable of the lost sheep. It's a great place to start!

Why? Well, it features a cute, charismatic, and cuddly creature (the sheep) and tells one of the most powerful messages of the whole Bible: that God has not forgotten them, and that God loves humanity (represented by the lost sheep) so much that he sent his only begotten son, Jesus, to die for all of their sins. All of that captured in a short story, conveyed here in less than 30 lovely pages! Wow!

The brevity and conciseness is a strength of this book, not a weakness.

Children have short attention spans. You're competing for their attentions with live-streaming, video games, social media, and smartphone apps. If you're going to impact them, you need to do so quickly. And this book achieves that.

Once you get through the somewhat heavy-handed opening, this book flies. You could probably read this with your childen in ten minutes or less, which is perfect for bedtime!

Accomodating that is the fact that this book isn't wordy at all. It's very brief. And the lines are relatively easy to read. They rhyme. And the vocabulary is simple. Now, in all honesty, some of these lines sound a little contrived, usually to fit the rhyme scheme. But they do their jobs.

Kids love rhymes. We'd rather they be engaged with the text because of the rhymes than be bored or disengaged at someone just telling them the story.

Honestly, there's a part of us that wants to say that the 3-4 pages could've been relegated to the explanation at the end of the book. The first 3-4 pages talk a lot more about the macro picture: that this book/series brings the words of Jesus to life in storybook form and makes it apparently clear that this book has evangelistic aims (i.e. we'd love it if you became a Christian). A part of us felt like this put the cart before the horse, frontloading the heavy-handed, didactic stuff in the beginning may have not been the preferred approach. If this stuff had been saved for the end of the book, it could've helped children to understand the sheep and the shepherd's story without risking potentially boring or scaring them away. For example, there is an illustration of Jesus being crucified (with some blood) early on. While this event is crucial to the faith and the ultimate message, it may have been better to save that for after the sheep and shepherd's story, once the kids were already hooked and engaged, ready to hear the deeper meaning of the message.

Now, we get it... this was supposed to be the first in the series, and was supposed to introduce readers to the fact that the series will be covering these topics and these three specific parables.

This book does take some expected creative liberties with this well-known story, and there's really nothing wrong with that. The shepherd does a lot more than just leave his flock to find the missing sheep, he actually goes on a whole adventure (albeit in one page), going through a marsh and climbing a hill or a mountain to get a better view. That's great because it shows that God didn't just casually, nonchalantly wave his hand to save his creation, he made the ultimate sacrifice for them.

And the sheep's side of the story is expanded too. The sheep gets distracted and led astray by a dragonfly and a cow (which is kinda funny). The cow being there seems a little random, but it hearkens back to the Hebrews in the wilderness who infamously made a golden calf to worship while Moses was away meeting with God. So, it kinda makes sense. And kids can point out the cow and the sound that its bell makes ("CLANG CLANG"). Also, he gets himself caught in the thorns and bristles like some of the unfortunate seeds that the sewer sewed in another of Jesus' parables.

The sheep is cute enough, but there were times when we felt its face was a bit too flat and human-like. We think this is because the illustrators had to find a way to convey human emotions with a non-human/anthropomorphic animal. We would've also loved it if the raccoons were cuter, but it's not the biggest deal.

Speaking of the illustrators... we'd really like to take our hats off to them, even despite us being slightly critical of the sheeps head/face. They did a commendable job.

The book credits Onofrio Orlando from WM Art Studio as the line artist. It credits Mariya Stoyanova as the color artist. Orland is from Malta and Stoyanova is from the United Kingdom, so this was an international effort!

That, along with the book itself, really shows you how much Jesus and The Bible still mean to millions around the world. People who may have never seen each other or met in person—people hundreds or even thousands of miles apart—can still find common ground in their faith, beliefs, and these universal stories of sacrifice, salvation, and redemption.

Check it out on Amazon!