If God Were a Great Big Bear

By Paul Harbridge, illustrated by Marta Dorado. Beaming Books, 2025. 32 pages. $18.99/hardcover; $17.99/eBook.

Books for young children seem deceptively simple, but only the carefully crafted ones can capture their attention; satisfy adults’ standards; and hold up through many, many readings. In my experience, the sound of the text when read aloud is one of the most critical elements, as is colorful and appealing artwork.

The steady, driving rhythm of If God Were a Great Big Bear immediately recalled some of the most popular books that I read to my children when they were small. Lines vary by only a few syllables; stanzas are always four lines, and many of them repeat with slight variation from page to page, providing a heartbeat to the words.

Those small changes also provide the message of the book, as each page imagines God as a different creature who would have created the world as only that animal, plant, or natural phenomenon would have done. The bear, the lilac bush, and the star each create a world that would please them: each describing a part of the world they and we all share.

Paul Harbridge’s lyrical text builds to the final example—“If God were a little child, / And She very well may be, / She’d make secret paths and summer fields / And puppies, wouldn’t She?”—before ending with a stanza that connects all the imagined creations with a Creator who has made a world to delight everyone in it and who has left a bit of “Him/Her/Themself” in everything and everyone in that world.

The graphic illustrations by Marta Dorado bring out the joyous, lush nature of the world that is evoked by the words, and every page has enough detail for children to find parts of the illustration that they particularly enjoy: whether a rabbit in its warren on the page about the earthworm or the octopus in the whale’s “vast, mysterious oceans.” There is often a child in the scenes, though not always, giving children a place to find themselves in the story even before the final scenes.

This is a beautiful book with a simple but profound premise. Harbridge and Dorado have created a children’s book that will reward nightly readings for as long as children request them.

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Mark Jolly-Van Bodegraven came to the Religious Society of Friends through the lived witness of peace activists and other Quakers; the space that Friends hold for unprogrammed worship and universalism; and Quakers’ literary tradition of journals, pamphlets, and this magazine. He works in higher education communications and lives in Newark, Del.