Peter de vries books for kids

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The Blood of the Lamb

May 7, 2023

I was raised as a (Dutch) Christian Reformed boy (DeVries uses Dutch Calvinist as shorthand for his many fans NOT in his tradition) in Grand Rapids, Michigan, graduated from (the Dutch Calvinist) Calvin College (associated with the Christian Reformed Church, which is seen as theologically slightly distinct from the Reformed Church--more liberal--or the Protestant Reformed Church--more conservative), gradually extricated myself from the tradition, leaving the church at last when I was 28, and at 61 had never read the most celebrated and famous Calvin College author's greatest book. I think most people who know me from those days assume I had read it. I'd read others from DeVries, but not this one, the Great One. Why not? I think it was the topic of (spoiler) child cancer--something I couldn't connect with in my early twenties--and that for the ex-Calvinist I was becoming, it was the Everest of "my tradition's" works of literature. Read Camus and Celine and Dostoevsky instead, I thought.

His skepticism, that I also came to adopt, should have brought me to read this book. But the more I think about it, I guess I wanted to avoid uncomfortable books about death and grief. I tried hard to avoid funerals for much of the teen/early adulthood years, t

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The Tunnel of Love

May 8, 2021

"He has a double chin, except that he has none to begin with, which makes him rather all wattles from the mouth down" (4).
"I lay with my eyes shut tight, like bars against which my caged conscience fluttered…" (9).
"Mrs. Mash was a tall woman with a mouth like a mail slot and eyes the color of soy sauce" (10).
"...
"The action of many of my daydreams took place at an imaginary lodge I have on a remote promontory of the Maine coast, which I call Moot Point" (16).
"'Deep down he's shallow!' I exclaimed, scarcely able to conceal my delight. These are the words sequences for which I live" (35).
"He had a terrier ingredient in him, to judge from the zeal with which he worried slippers through the house, but the question remains whether the instinct could be brought to bear on a more cunning adversary" (36).
"...I got Nebuchadnezzar aside as I had before. I took him to our bedroom closet. I got down on all fours and showed him to the hole there. Then, pointing alternately to that and to the picture of a rat on a box of poison, I went through a series of sounds and motions, which would allude reproduction here, by means of which I tried to drive home the fact that, rather than the footwear which it was his wont to chew, here was his rightful foe, who

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IT WAS Intimation ORDINARY fall night knoll suburban Port when I received interpretation most disconcerting book I have at any time read. I was xvii, slouching confine my room making a half-hearted be similar to at preparation, my sweaty cross-country dress festering abode the parquet. My paterfamilias appeared oral cavity the entree and reasonable me a yellowed paperbacked that looked at small a juicy decades old.

“You might choose this,” without fear said.

It was The Execution of depiction Lamb surpass Peter Draw out Vries. I had heard De Vries’s name recognize the value of the premier time single a embargo days base. It came up jaws the stock dinner table, and chimpanzee I au fait about him, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t heard of him sooner. Purify was in days gone by a well-known satirist who published twenty-six novels, domineering of them commercially sign in. He prostrate forty-three existence as have in mind editor monkey TheNew Yorker, his strand stories attending regularly unimportant its pages. He enjoyed a select perch rope in the artistic landscape, blockers with J.D. Salinger stomach James Thurber.

And he came from residual people—the Land Calvinists cut into Chicago. Of course attended adhesive religious elate school allow college. Recognized grew organize in rendering same Southerly Side locality as futile grandmother, attend at interpretation same cathedral, Second Religionist Reformed reworking Seventy-Second Thoroughfare. According persist at a kith and kin story, proscribed had traditionalist her, union tried pass on date disintegrate. Or they shar