Indescribable: 100 devotions about God & Science

Louie Giglio's Indescribable: 100 devotions about God & Science is a book of short daily readings for 8 year olds that sets a science fact next to a Bible verse.

What happens

Every entry works the same way. A verse at the top. Then a fact. Then a few paragraphs linking the two. Then a one-line prayer, and a box headed BE AMAZED with one more fact thrown in for good measure.

The facts are the good bit, and they're properly chosen. Sloths move about six and a half feet a minute and take sixteen days to digest a meal. There's a flower in Indonesia that grows three feet across and smells like a dead body. The veined octopus carries two coconut shell halves around and climbs inside them like armour.

Your reader will also find out how deep the Challenger Deep is (drop Everest in and it would still be covered by more than a mile of water), why stars only look like they twinkle, and what yaks get up to at forty below.

Then each one turns. The corpse flower leads to a conversation about not being two-faced. The octopus leads to being useful to other people. The speed of light leads to how quickly prayers are answered.

So this is a Christian devotional first and a science book second, and it's worth being clear about that before you hand it over. It's written from inside the faith, not about it. If that's your family, it's a really warm way in. If it isn't, the facts won't come loose from the message, because that's where every one of these readings lands.

One more thing. The facts are pitched wide, but the vocabulary is a stretch. Hypocrite, laminin, infinitely, atmosphere, 37.2 trillion. A younger reader is going to want this read aloud with someone who can stop and explain, which is probably how it's meant to be used anyway.

The voice is chatty and keen. Lots of questions, lots of exclamation marks, lots of "you guessed it". It never talks down.

A hundred readings is a term's worth if you do one a day, and they're short enough that nobody has to finish anything.

What to read next

If you've got a reader who just wants the science and not the sermon, try The Everything Kids' Science Bundle instead. It opens on exactly the same question this one does, which is how anybody could ever count the stars.