Tales from the Back Pew-Kids Book Review and Giveaway

Mike Thaler has written more than 200 books for children, including Scholastic’s bestselling “Black Lagoon” series, which introduced “monster teacher” Mrs Green in The Teacher from the Black Lagoon 20 years ago.

Mike is also the creator of “The Letterman” from PBS’ longtime educational show “Electric Company”. Mr Thaler is known as “America’s Riddle King” and travels to classrooms worldwide helping children and teachers create their own stories riddles and books.

Eleven years ago, at age 60, Thaler devoted his life to Jesus Christ and he says, “life has gone from black and white to glorious Technicolor.” Today he uses his imaginative storytelling and passion for Christ in his new series “Tales from the Back Pew”. He says it’s “Black Lagoon goes to church.” These books are published by ZonderKids and are for ages 6-9.

I have read one book in the series, Preacher Creature Strikes on Sunday, and I have shared it with a few children of varying ages. This is a great book for kids who have never been to church or who are maybe moving to a new church. Thaler does a good job of expressing a child’s fear of the unknown and what the child may have heard about church.

There are very long songs with a thousand verses, and just when you think you’re done, they go back to the beginning and start all over again. And you have to stand the whole time. It’s sort of like the Pledge of Allegiance…only longer. And then, instead of paying you for singing, they collect money.

Of course in the end the child enjoys church and can’t wait to go back next Sunday. The illustrations in the books are beautiful and imaginative. Jared Lee is the illustrator and he has worked with Thaler for over 30 years.This would be a great book for a child new to a Protestant, main stream denominational church setting, similar to what I grew up in. The children I know and shared this book with come from either an Assemblies of God or non-denominational/Pentecostal background and they were unable to relate the church experiences in this book. We all enjoyed the way the child in book shared the Old Testament stories of Moses, Noah, and Jonah.

You can purchase the book:Preacher Creature Strikes on Sunday OR

You can enter to win the book:

How to Enter:
For your first entry:Since Mr Thaler is known as “America’s Riddle King” you must leave me a comment with a riddle and it’s answer. You must also follow or subscribe to this blog and leave a comment here telling me that you have done this Please leave a valid e-mail address or twitter name so that I can notify if you win. **You must do all of this to be entered.

If you would like extra entries you can earn them for doing any or all of the following:

* tweet this contest and post the url of the tweet as a separate comment (you can do this 1x per day each day of the contest-just post each tweet url in a separate comment)
* blog about this contest and link to this post (not just a link to the contest) then leave me a link to your post in a separate comment
* stumble this post with a review and link it here in separate comment

The winner will be chosen on Friday, March 13th at 8:00pm. Good Luck!!