The Vase of Many Colors by Rachel Thoene
I am grateful I was asked to review this book. I don't normally review children's books, but this is one of those children's books that ends up speaking to the grown ups just as much as to the child!
Description:
In the very small house, on the very grand hill, in the very small town author Rachel Thoene – daughter of veteran bestsellers Bodie and Brock Thoene - masterfully explores the captivating notions of forgiveness and grace in The Vase of Many Colors. This beautifully written and colorfully illustrated family tale peeks into the world of the very bouncy girl and her old, crooked grandmother. A world where rainbows appear on the walls and simple flower-gathering is a nightly ritual.
Vase of Many Colors in you.
Themes of the Book
Finding forgiveness. Picking up the pieces after an accident. Learning to forgive yourself. The meaning of grace.
About Rachel Thoene (daughter of Brock and Bodie Thoene)
Rachel knows what it’s like to pick up broken pieces. As a site administrator at two alternative schools for at-risk students in an urban school district in Sacramento, California, she helps students put the pieces of their broken lives back together and discover success where there was only self doubt. As a mother, she finds new beauty in the hearts of her two children, Ian and Jessie. “Every person we come into contact with has the potential to be a beautiful and valuable work of art,” Rachel says. The inspiration for the story began as an email to a friend who was struggling with how to relate to her teenage son. When the story further developed, Rachel realized that the underlying message appealed to the experiences of adults and children alike.
A few questions she was asked about the book:
Who is the target audience for Vase of Many Colors? Adults or Children?
Oh! Why limit it to just those two groups? I think the target audience is whomever has relationships with other human beings… some of my teachers have used it in their classes with their high school aged students and also with their own grandchildren. I have shared the story with school children and adults in difficult situations. It doesn’t really matter who you are or how old, if you deal with other human beings, you need to read this story. My boss has used it with staff members. I have shared it with some of my students who are teen age mothers and grandmothers who are raising their grandchildren…. The target audience is humans.
How can adults and children both benefit from reading Vase of Many Colors?
I think the story speaks to the fact that ALL of us have made, currently make and will continue to make mistakes. We will experience heartaches but WOW! The good news is that we can be forgiven, we can be healed, and we can be whole again. And it even applies to really deep hurts, like death of a loved one or a serious illness, loss of a job or other traumatic spiritual and emotional experiences… we’ll be all busted up to pieces but you know what? God can put us back together again. And when He does, we find ourselves staring into the old dark, musty closets of our past and wondering how in all heaven and earth He is going to take all that garbage and make anything good of it…. But He always does. And we never look the same but we’re new and improved… we might have a couple of emotional limps or scars left over but you ask any cancer patient who has beaten the disease and they will tell you that the scars serve as reminders of the battle and their courage to win and also as their reminder of their humanity. Those reminders cause us to be compassionate toward others who are experiencing the same or similar issues.
My Review:
I read this book to my girls (5 and 8) and found that this is the kind of book that can be enjoyed on 2 levels really. My girls enjoyed the story and the colors and recognized themselves in the girl who dances and twirls about the house (very common in our home too!). They were grateful for a grandmother who could fix the vase and "bring it back to life" in a sense. I got the story on a different level. I was thinking of picking up broken pieces in a symbolic sense and how hard it can be to pick them up and make something of them. I think the last page says it all: "To appreciate wholeness, you have to have been broken...to know happiness you have to have known darkness. To see color, you have to have known darkness. To smell perfume, you have to have known decay." This is a great gift book for someone who feels broken and needs a reminder that we can go on and that God can make something beautiful out of the broken pieces.
