Review: The Boy from the House of Bread

I shoved a pillow behind my back as I sat down on my daughter’s bed. “Settle in. We gotta new book.” A smile spread across her face when she saw the cover of Andrew Wilson’s The Boy from the House of Bread. “Why does he have all that bread?” she said. “We’ll have to read it to find out.”

Abstract concepts are difficult for young children. Developmentally, they don’t usually have the ability to think abstractly until the ages of 11 or 12. Right now, my four-year-old is attracted to concrete words and images. As a parent, I’m also looking for ways to communicate the truth of Scripture in ways she can grasp—to make that huge story of the Bible seem like a story for her, because it is. That’s what helps make this book engaging.

Wilson is skilled in weaving together the threads of the gospel around the theme of bread. Bread is, in fact, a theme that runs all through Scripture. But in this book, he focuses on Jesus as “the boy from the house of bread” (the literal translation of Bethlehem is “house of bread”). However, Jesus is in the background, since the story is told through the eyes of another boy, Alex, who comes from “an African town in the Med.”

My favorite couplets came when Alex describes the parables he’s heard Jesus telling the people.

Then He told us some stories of scattering seeds
And harvesting crops and pulling up weeds.
He kept on describing the kingdom of heaven
With stories of flour, of wheat, and of leaven,
And feasting, and everyone poor being fed.
They all seemed to be about bread.

It’s striking to think of how much Jesus used bread analogies and how he even called himself “the bread of life.” The latter is still very hard for a four-year-old to understand. But the concrete theme of bread throughout the book gave her a window onto the biblical world. This man who had come from a house of bread, who multiplied bread, who gave bread to the disciples at Passover and who claimed to be the best bread of all—this is the one her little heart marvels at. And bread is a window through which she can stare at him. And I stare, too.

If you have kids from the ages of 4–7, The Boy from the House of Bread is a creative, playful attempt at showcasing the marvels of Christ from a child’s perspective. It’s one we’ll return to repeatedly in answer to that famous childhood chant, “Read it again!” You’ll emerge with a greater appreciation for themes of Scripture . . . and maybe with a greater appreciation for bread and all it stands for.