The Glorious Impossible [Illustrated with Frescoes from the Scrovegni Chapel by Giotto]

Uses Giotto di Bondone's frescoes from the Scrovegni Chapel to take the reader from the Annunciation through the Pentecost. The pictures are awesome.

When my son was about seven years old I was looking for a Christmas book to read out loud. He was (and is) a very bright and verbal child and had truly outgrown most children's books. I opened THE GLORIOUS IMPOSSIBLE and read one of the first lines. "In Scripture, whenever an angel appears to

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anyone, the angel's first words usually are, "FEAR NOT!"---which gives us an idea of what angels must have looked like." With a beginning like that, how could it go wrong? The book is a beautifully illustrated story of the life of Christ. It, naturally begins with Mary and the angel Gabriel and continues in a more or less straight line. I say more or less, because L'Engle drops in little pearls of wisdom. This book became our traditional Christmas read aloud book until we hit the terrible teens and I was informed that this was all just mass hysteria and a method to control people, yada,yada,yada. I still read it and when my grandson comes for Christmas, I'll read it to him.

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Giotto illustrated the entire life of Christ in this chapel, pioneering the three-dimensional representation of figures in early 1300s. L'Engle does a good job of retelling the stories (but I think she should have used more of the classic KJV language).