A Special Fish for Jonah By Andy McGuire

• 03/18/2014
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A Special Fish for Jonah: Because God Has a Job for Everyone
Andy McGuire
Harvest House Publishers (2010)
ISBN 9780736925617
Reviewed by Cayden Aures (age 5 ½) and Mom for Reader Views (02/10)

“A Special Fish for Jonah: Because God Has a Job for Everyone” begins by telling the Bible story of Jonah and how God had told him to go to Ninevah but Jonah didn’t like the people there so he went the other way instead.  God then had a fish swallow Jonah and spit him out on a land toward Ninevah.  The book then goes on to hypothesize about how God picked an angelfish to carry out the task of picking which fish would swallow Jonah and the steps that the angelfish took to ensure that she picked the right one.

Cayden:  “I liked looking at the different kinds of fish in the book and why they couldn’t be the one to swallow Jonah.  We know the story of Jonah but I thought that a whale was the one that swallowed him.  The fish in this book that is picked isn’t a whale it is a Specialfish that swallows lots of things like boats and stuff so he is good at doing the job.  I liked the part at the end that had pictures of all the different fish with their names.  My favorite was the reef shark!”

Parent’s comments:

We enjoyed the take on how the selection process of the fish that swallowed Jonah may have gone as told in Andy McGuire’s book “A Special Fish for Jonah: Because God Has a Job for Everyone.”  I too had remembered the story as being Jonah and the Whale; however, after doing a little more research on the subject, it appears to be named as a “big fish” and not specifically a whale.  The illustrations were creative and fun (especially the reef shark with his fork and knife) and we liked the educational glossary at the end