How children’s books challenge us to hope harder

Reading an award-winning children’s book challenges Elizabeth Wainwright much more than expected - to imagine and hope.

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

A close up of face, showing an eye, mostly obscured by a closely-held open book.

This year, the Waterstones book of the year prize was awarded to Impossible Creatures, a fantasy book for children by Katherine Rundell. This was not the children’s book of the year; this was overall book of the year – it beat novels and non-fiction books for adults. I felt momentarily but deeply joyful when I heard the news and was curious why.

During the pandemic, I found myself unable to read the non-fiction books I usually turn too. Even adult fiction felt heavy. It was children’s books and authors I turned to. Philip Pullman, Dodie Smith, Alan Garner, Ursula K Le Guin. Others new to me. On reflection, I wasn’t reading these books because they were in any way easier, because they weren’t – they asked me to think and hope and imagine much harder than a lot of adult books, despite everything the news would have me believe. And it is for that very reason that I sought these books out. The Waterstones prize made me think a bit more about this – and why it might matter now especially.

Imagination helps us to confront and solve problems – it is not an indulgence, it is essential for the becoming world, and for being the people we are called to be.

First, I thought about my time as a District Councillor in local government. Here, I quickly learned all sorts of things about planning, environment, community, working across opposition and more. I needed to call on my perseverance, patience, strategic thinking. But the things that I found myself calling on again and again were imagination and relationship-building. Building relationships – especially with people who weren’t like me – was the only way to get things done. And imagination because it’s the thing that recreates, that sees things as they could be not as they are. Albert Einstein said, “we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them”, and I’ve seen how that’s true. It did not feel enough, for example, to try to fix problems of dwindling budgets with more cuts and more inefficient meetings. Instead, imagination asked me to think about what this budget-setting process might look like at its best, and how the wider community might help us decide priorities, and how we might restructure our work so that the District doesn’t just scrape by, but thrives. It asked me to step out of business-as-usual, and imagine business-as-it-could-be.

Jesus too shows us the importance of imagination – he so often called out who he saw people to be, not who they were. And he points us now towards what is yet to come. He calls us to wait, and to trust in his arrival – however distant it might feel. Children’s books often do this too: Frodo trusting that the ring would be destroyed, imagining life outside of the grip of the darkness of Mordor, despite all evidence to the contrary. Bastian’s imagination helping to save Fantasia in the Neverending Story. Jo March showing the possibility of another kind of life in Little Women. Imagination helps us to confront and solve problems – it is not an indulgence, it is essential for the becoming world, and for being the people we are called to be.

I think the best children’s books do the same thing – they ask us to look up, to look out, to feel the whisper of the voice behind us urging us on to something more beautiful.

Second, the children’s books I read during lockdown gave me hope in a way that books for adults didn’t at the time. Hope is, I think, innately tied to imagination. It asks us to look ahead, even when things aren’t clear, and walk forward. Rebecca Solnit explores hope, optimism, and activism in her short book Hope In the Dark. She says,

“Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope.”

I think the best children’s literature shows us how to hope, and shows us what right action can look like when we invoke that hope. In Rundell’s Impossible Creatures, Mal and Christopher must save the ‘Archipelago’ – where mythical creatures still live – and the world beyond them from a growing darkness. Hope shines bright, reminding the reader that it is not naïve but necessary and world-changing, if we let it be. Hope changes things. In the New Testament, Paul tells that along with faith and love, hope will remain. When it feels like the world – fictional, or real – is falling away, hope will remain. Coupled with imagination, bound with faith and love, made active with hands and hearts, it might just pull us through to things we cannot yet see.

When she won the National Book Award, Ursula K Le Guin underlined the necessity of imagination and hope right now:

“Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom – poets, visionaries – realists of a larger reality.”

Jesus was the ultimate realist of a larger reality. He asks us to love in the face of hate, to believe that food and wine can come from faith, to believe so hard in love – not as a pink heart-shaped commodity, but as a world-shaking force – that we might literally see resurrection. Jesus lived in a particular place, at a particular time, grounded in people and soil and society, but always pointing to the bigger truth he knew, and to a world that did not yet exist. I think the best children’s books do the same thing – they ask us to look up, to look out, to feel the whisper of the voice behind us urging us on to something more beautiful. Importantly, this is not a rejection of the world as it is – we are called to love our neighbours here and now, to build the kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. But in what is, there is the seed of what could be, there is a light that shines in places that are still dark. I think the gospel, and the best children’s books, help us to see that light and see what it might illuminate. Jesus knew that children’s minds were perhaps better at seeing this light – he even says, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” Allowing ourselves to imagine, to hope, is perhaps the only way we’ll take the kingdom of heaven seriously here on earth.

Katherine Rundell herself has pointed out that children’s books don’t just make good readers, they make good people. I think that with imagination, hope, courage, and more, they help call forth the people we are becoming, and the world that could become. That is why I turned to them during lockdowns, that is why I turn to them now as parts of our world seem dark, and that is why I turn again and again to Jesus – the ultimate realist of a larger reality.

Review

Books

Culture

Podcasts

Re-enchanting

4 November 2025

5 min read

The book, the ritual, and the reader

Season 7 of Re-Enchanting explores how books shape our habits and our search for meaning

Tom Rippon

Tom Rippon is Assistant Editor at Roots for Churches, an ecumenical charity.

A reader sits on a sofa with a raised leg and holds a book

Jonathan Sanchez on Unsplash.

When was the last time a book elicited spontaneous reverence from you? It’s something of a cliché to say that books take you on a journey, but sometimes a book comes along which simply demands to be read with ceremony.

This is the experience of the writer Donna Freitas, just one of the guests welcomed onto season 7 of the Re-enchanting podcast. In her conversation with Belle Tindell and Justin Brierley, she describes how her morning routine of coffee and a book has practically attained the status of a ritual for her. Freitas describes the deliberate preparations she made for the final chapter of Alice Winn’s In Memoriam, a historical novel exploring the relationship between two young soldiers in the trenches of the First World War as their idealised understanding of war shatters and their suppressed feelings for one another play out against a shifting backdrop of class, national identity and belonging. Freitas’ ceremonial approach to finishing her book - you’ll have to listen to the episode to hear more about this - may sound somewhat unusual at first for the respect and honour that it implies is due to a book, but this notion of textual reverence finds a distant echo in the Christian faith, where the Word, living and written, is central.

Freitas’ particular experience of faith is recounted in her book, Wishful Thinking: How I Lost My Faith and Why I Want to Find It, but listening to her description of her reading experience posed its own questions for me. At what point does habit become ritual? And how do we distinguish between them? Even as people develop individual, secular rituals to give rhythm to their lives, this does not always translate into an openness towards religious ritual. Does this mean that ritual today is understood as an individual, rather than shared, activity? Despite some evidence suggesting a revival of sorts in the Christian faith, most of the growing churches in the UK tend place more emphasis on spontaneity than ritual, but perhaps our continued desire for ritual and familiarity should give mainstream churches a reason to pause in their current approaches to church planting?

Either way, for many of us, a home-grown ritual of an enticing cup of coffee paired with the smooth, dry pages of a book first thing in the morning may simply sound like an inviting, yet sadly unattainable, prospect. Sometimes just getting everyone and everything out the door on time constitutes an epic in itself. However, since there’s no harm in fantasizing, let’s peruse the Re-enchanting back-catalogue for more reading recommendations.

Looking back over season 7 of Re-enchanting, I’m struck by how popular biography remains amongst our guests’ reading choices. Nadim Ednan-Laperouse recommends Heidi Barr’s autobiographical account of the near-death experience which led to her conversion from Orthodox Judaism, What I Saw in Heaven. Lamorna Ash, whose work explores the softening of Gen Z’s attitude towards Christianity, appropriately lends balance to her Re-enchanting moment with her recommendation of John Stuart Mill’s autobiography, which recounts his journey away from faith. The faith landscape in the UK is certainly shifting at the present time and perhaps the only way to truly understand these shifts is to read both sides of the story. We need to read about journeys away from faith as much as journeys to faith in order to understand the society in which we work and witness. A data scientist might call these eliminating biases, a literary critic might call it awareness of an unreliable narrator.

Telling the story of someone’s life is at the centre of Bear Grylls’ most recent work, The Greatest Story Ever Told, in which he retells the life of Jesus through the eyes of those around him. The emergence of the faith is told from the perspective of those coming to faith, a hint perhaps that faith has to be remade, reborn, resurrected even, afresh for each person. Read Bear Grylls’ own take on his book, written for Seen & Unseen earlier this year.

Grylls’ own work seems to have an almost essay-like quality through its short, accessible chapters and essay collections seem popular amongst our other guests as well. Lamorna Ash also recommends Pulphead by the journalist John Jeremiah Sullivan, a collection of essays spanning topics from eco-anxiety and the blues to the Tea Party and Christian rock, each giving a brief insight into the concerns and ponderings of a thousand other minds. It strikes me that such collections are the literary equivalents of hitting shuffle play, the perfect fit for those reading rituals that have to be scattered in-between other moments of activity. If you’re searching for some faith-based content for these moments, then I recommend Richard Carter’s Letters from Nazareth, a collection of meditations from the contemplative tradition written for those ‘catch your breath’ moments in the day.

Alternatively, if it’s escapism and adventure that you are after in these moments, then take up Grylls’ own suggestion, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder, by David Grann, a true story yet wildly adventurous. For those in search of more light-hearted reading, then turn to another stalwart of Re-enchanting reading lists, C.S. Lewis, whose The Silver Chair comes recommended by NYT columnist and author, Ross Douthat. As Lewis himself said, ‘a children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children’s story in the slightest.’ Perhaps it’s time to put Lewis’ own works to the test.

Long summer days of the kind envisaged in children’s books may now be a distant memory for most of us, but with each change in season comes a new reason to pick up some reading material. I hope these autumnal days with their familiar ritual of falling leaves lead to a home-grown ritual of turning leaves for you.

Some further suggestions:

Letters from Nazareth by Richard Carter – Meditations on home from St Martin-in-the-Fields.

Her First American by Lore Segal – An exploration of Jewish-Black trauma and solidarity in 1950s New York.

seven steeples by Sara Baume – A meditative novel on the rhythmic course of life in rural Ireland.

How Bad Are Bananas? by Mike Berners-Lee – Bite-sized explanations of our place in a changing climate.

Season 8 starts 12 November

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