David and the Kingmaker

Fiona Veitch Smith is a freelance writer of children’s fiction and has lectured in journalism and creative writing. She lives in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Amy Warmington is an artist, illustrator and designer based in Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

A superb new series for primary-school children by Fiona Veitch Smith is all about David. It stirred my own limp faith, let alone my three-year-old’s burgeoning spirituality, to read of the young David’s prayer for protection – how his "heart beat as strong as a drum as God filled him up with courage".It was moving, too, to hear my child’s voice so clearly in David’s many phrases: "Dear God, why doesn’t anyone want to play with me?", or in the eager question, "Will I get a crown?" after his anointing – so well does the author understand the modern child.David’s spat with Goliath is fun, of course, but there are clever anachronistic illustrations throughout – the handsome but vain Elib in David and the Kingmaker, for example, is drawn holding a pot of hair gel. And yet biblical names and terminology are retained, even neatly explained: a prophet, we learn, is someone "who can see inside people’s hearts and minds.Jemima Thackeray, Church Times