Folk Like Me: The Read Aloud Book of Saints [Paperback]

I have a few books about different saints, and this one is my favorite. Lucchese wrote this book so that it could be used in a classroom setting. There are individual passages meant to be read aloud for different weeks for two school years. Parochial schools and Sunday School programs may want to use this for their students. Where I help out with Sunday School, we have many children who are very new Christians, and these stories are mostly beyond them. For example, the story about St. Patrick assumes that students have already heard that he "drove the snakes out of Ireland." The kids in the program where I assist were only aware of wearing green on St. Patricks.
Each saint story is well told and would make a great read aloud to a group of children with the right background. There was a wonderful twist to many of the stories I hadn't heard anywhere else, the St Patrick story included. These are inspirational stories letting everyone know that we, too, face challenges and we can overcome them in the ways that these saints did.
The book is well-researched, Lucchese has the credentials with her PhD in cultural geography to write about these saints from all over the world, and throughout the last 2000 years of history. She has avoided many of the cliched saint stories in favor of new ones that students are likely to be unfamiliar with. This is a big part of why this book stands out over other saint books, it is well-written with different stories than you will find elsewhere.

We all love stories of saints. In some traditions, we use other terms to describe these figures, but they're basically men, women and in rare cases children who show heroic spiritual goodness -- often in the face of great danger.

Texas-based Kathryn Mitchell Lucchese, who has a doctorate in cultural geography and has spent years working with school children, has just handed us all a tremendous gift. At her school, she began reading aloud a weekly story of a saint, which she carefully edited for maximum impact and, in some cases, to soften the violent edge a bit for her younger students' ears. These became very popular. She did this year after year and, now, in a great big paperback book by Morehouse Publishing, she offers her stories to all of us.

She organizes the book for Christian educators to use once a week in a school year that stretches from August to mid-June. She matches these saints nicely with their annual observances in the Christian liturgical calendar. For example, St. Nicholas falls in her early December readings just as St. Nick's saint day falls each year on December 6. As a good educator and geographer, Lucchese even adds a couple of dozen maps to the back of her book, so you can show kids exactly where each saint lived.

Of course, as a parent myself, I can tell you this book shouldn't be limited to classrooms. It's great for parents to read aloud!

What a treasure trove -- not only for parents, sacred studies teachers or school chaplains,but for anyone wishing to become acquainted with the stories of amazing yet "common" folk. These are lives of people who show courage and goodness in most challenging times. They could serve to write their own essays for NPR's "This I Believe." And each story is told with such lively wit and charm that even the grimmest of martyrdoms seem almost bearable. The author manages to place each saint in vivid historical and geographical context, thus bringing our world and theirs closer. The book belongs in every school or church library collection, not on the shelf but in use.