Finding God in the Hobbit

Several months ago I received Finding God in the Hobbit from Tyndale as a review book. I was so excited about it, but I had one problem. I had not yet read The Hobbit! Fortunately, Sonlight took care of that for me, scheduling it as the final read-aloud for Core F.

Which, of course, brings me back to Finding God in the Hobbit. One of my hopes for the summer was to encourage my girls to broaden their non-fiction horizons, and this book seemed to fit the bill perfectly.

The chapters of Finding God in the Hobbit are very brief. Each one shares a scene from The Hobbit, then discusses a spiritual truth related to that scene. Although the writing style did challenge my young readers, there was nothing inappropriate for upper elementary children. If I had to do it all over again, I would probably wait until my youngest was in junior high before going through it with them both. But, since we were working through it together and discussing it, I was able to walk them through whatever they didn’t grasp.

I found no stretches in the spiritual applications made by author Jim Ware. Ware does not dive very deeply into any of his applications, and this is positive in two respects.

• Keeping the applications simple makes them applicable to a variety of theological perspectives. Readers can easily take the author’s thoughts and run with them, more deeply contemplating them in light of their own understanding of Scripture.
• The simplicity of the author’s thoughts allows a delightful springboard for discussion, making this an excellent group reader or read-aloud.

I will say that familiarity with The Hobbit is not sufficient for reading Finding God in the Hobbit, because the author also heavily references Lord of the Rings. In fact, there are LOTR spoilers. The LOTR references were unnecessary, in my opinion, as The Hobbit sufficiently supported every point made. But, it was also neat to see how the books tie together from a spiritual perspective.

Bottom line: Finding God in the Hobbit was definitely a fun way to stretch my girls and encourage them to read more non-fiction.

This book was sent to me by Tyndale in exchange for my honest review.