Customer Reviews

Seven Lonely Places, Seven Warm Places: The Vices and Virtues for Children

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It's a delightful book. In a publishing area that is often glutted with trivia, it is refreshing to find a book for children that says something significant in an entertaining and significant way.

Through amazingly creative pictures and text, this book entertains and enlightens children about important moral issues. Without lecturing or preaching, it demonstrates with easily understood situations and examples how seven dark and lonely places can be transformed into Seven Warm Places filled with Light, Beauty, Happiness, and Love. The bright, funny illustrations and the creative use of text further enhance the content. I highly recommend this book to parents, to teachers and to children of all ages.

It is difficult to find good resources to teach our children about the "big" things in life - happily, this book has been an excellent way for our family to talk about choosing good (warm places) over sin (lonely places). This book explains what each of the seven vices are: what they look like, what they feel like, and how choosing those things will lead you to a lonely place indeed, removed from God and removed from others. It then illustrates the seven virtues, the warm places: what they look like, how we can put them into action. It closes with a prayer, asking God to lead us to the warm places, closer to Him. More than just that, however, this book explains each of them in terms that young children can understand and relate to. For example, how on earth would you explain the sin of lust to a child?? This book has a wonderful, simple, and yet profound, explanation.

Our 5-year-old daughter chose this book and requested it, on her own. We thought it was a rather unusual choice for such a little person, but we have returned to this book again and again. We've talked about our day, and things that went well, our "warm places"... and also times that we've chosen greed, or pride, i.e. the lonely places. Even at such a young age, our daughter is learning how to identify what are good and true choices in her behavior, and what choices are hard, lonely, sinful.

This is not a book to leave alone on the shelf. Rather, it is one to read with your child, to discuss with your child, to return to when the occasion arises. It is a superb tool for parents in guiding character development and faith formation.