For religious people, Easter isn’t just about the one day of celebration, it’s a whole season that can include Lent, the 40 days before Easter that are a time of reflection and sacrifice.
Sparrow’s Easter Garden by Roger Hutchison and illustrated by Ag Jatkowska focuses on the season of Lent and the preparation for new life that is happening in a religious sense and in the world more generally.
It opens with Sparrow visiting the garden to find that it’s messy and overgrown since the last time he visited. Friends Mousie, Buck and Turtle use their gifts to help clean up, plant seed and new plants and move other plants around to reset the garden for spring.
Despite a storm on Good Friday testing the animal’s faith that their work will pay off, Easter brings a bright, beautiful morning to a garden full of color, reminding the animals that “new life blooms in the morning light.”
I can’t help but find it unrealistic that a garden can be full of flowers at Easter, given as it usually falls in pretty early spring in the Northern Hemisphere, but you can understand where he’s going with the allegory here.
It’s clearly a religious book without using the word Jesus, though it does mention Holy Week, Good Friday, Holy Saturday and Easter (and includes the animals singing hallelujahs). the book could be a gentle way to talk to kids about the Easter story and help relate it to their own lives, because we all have times when we despair but with hard work and hope, the new day will be better.
And of course on the surface level it’s also a cute book about friends working together to complete a difficult task and their work paying off in the end, which is always a valuable message for kids.
About the book: 32 pages, hardcover. Published 2026 by Beaming Books. Suggested retail price $17.99.
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