Review - Bible Infographics for Kids Volume 2: Light and Dark, Heroes and Villains, and Mind-Blowing Bible Facts

Bible Infographics for Kids Volume 2: Light and Dark, Heroes and Villains, and Mind-Blowing Bible Facts
by Harvest House Publishers
Date: 2019
Publisher: Harvest House Publishers
Reading level: C
Book type: picture book non-fiction
Pages: 56
Format: e-book
Source: NetGalley

Boring vs. the Bible? No contest!

Ding, ding, ding! Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Bible Infographics for Kids Vol. 2, where we're going to compare some of the most AWESOME opposites from God's Word and witness amazingly EPIC battles between good and evil.

See these fierce foes square off in the infographic octagon:

Light vs Darkness—and why you'll never see them in the same place.

Angels vs Demons—both are powerful, but only one side will win in the end.

Feats of God vs Failures of Men—God did incredible things. Men? Not so much.

False Gods vs the One True God—separating the many pretenders from the only real contender.

Heaven vs. Hell—hell is no joke. But neither is heaven. It will be seriously mind-blowing!

Plus...fantastic animals, fallen empires, the 411 on the four Gospels, and way more!

And yes, we're going to explore more fun and quirky facts from God's Word and gain a bunch of Bible knowledge along the way. Because that's what infographics do. They make the most exciting book in the world that much more craze-mazing!

(synopsis from Goodreads)

While I did learn a few things from this book, I can't really say that I enjoyed it. Aside from grating against my non-Christian sensitivities, the book is kind of sloppy in its editing... which is going to bother me no matter what the subject matter.

I debated whether to tag this as non-fiction or not, but finally decided in favour of it simply because the book heavily references the Bible. Whether any of the stories in it are true is beyond the scope of this review. This is a book that will likely only appeal to Christians, anyway, but I want to address a few things that I noticed while I was reading.

The first thing is the editing. The way the text is written isn't very consistent. The spelling of names could change within the same page, comma conventions for large numbers aren't consistently followed, and BC dates aren't always noted as such. I wasn't about to go and check each and every Bible reference, either, so there may be even more mistakes that I'm not aware of. I really hate to see such sloppy work, especially in a book for kids.

Tied into this first point are the outright errors. Some of these may be confusing. The book tries to throw in a little bit of science while talking about stars. Unfortunately, it gets things spectacularly wrong by stating:

The closest star to our galaxy is 4.2 light-years away, so the light we see is 4.2 years old.

This was probably supposed to be "solar system" rather than "galaxy", and any sharp-eyed reader is going to spot errors like this pretty quickly. So why didn't the editors? There are other things that are just plain wrong or confusing, like the reference to "jolly old St. Nicholas", referring to the historical figure... but who's pictured as Santa Claus, complete with red coat and hat. The book also claims that the Red Sea is a mistranslation of the Reed Sea... but when I looked it up, all I could find were old names in various languages all making reference to the colour red, possibly because of a particular reddish cyanobacteria that blooms in the waters there.

I was fairly engaged until about the halfway point, and that's where some pretty big leaps in logic start to make their appearance. We read about poor Uzziah who got a skin disease that deformed his face. Today, we know that that sort of thing just happens sometimes. But this book ignores anything scientific and attributes his affliction to God being miffed because he lit some incense. The section on hell is pretty horrifying (at least to a non-Christian; I can't understand why anyone who claims to be loving would want to bombard their children with such terrible thoughts and make them afraid they haven't done enough to escape a dismal fate). The section that tries to describe the Trinity just confused me. I'm not even sure the book knows what it's trying to say!

Circular logic and downright contradictions mar what could've been an interesting exploration of the Bible. Rather than simply explaining what the Bible says, this book interprets quite a bit of it, and sometimes it's a bit of a stretch. At one point, it talks about how a belief in witchcraft is a bad thing... and then, shortly after, it talks about how the Israelites saved themselves from the 10th plague by smearing lambs' blood on their doorposts in what appears to be some sort of magic ritual. So... which is it? At another point in the book, Samson is depicted as a not-so-bad guy... but he's later referred to as "the really bad" because he was tricked by Delilah. Way to blame the victim.

I wouldn't recommend this book in general, and because of the sloppiness, I wouldn't recommend it to Christians, either. It was an okay idea to do this in an infographic form to make the information easily digestible... but I still don't see why there are Bible characters running around with cellphones and pepperoni pizza. 

Thank you to NetGalley and Harvest House Publishers for providing a digital ARC.

Premise: 3/5
Meter: n/a
Writing: 2/5
Illustrations: 2/5
Originality: 2/5

Enjoyment: 1/5

Overall: 1.83 out of 5