ABOUT THE BOOK
The idea for The Good Pliosaur sprung from two of my loves: Jesus’s Parable of the Good Samaritan and extinct ocean creatures. For a while, I couldn’t figure out how to mesh these two ideas. How could I properly retell one of Jesus’s parables within the setting of the ancient ocean? Then, an idea: what if the long-necked plesiosaurs were the Jews who looked down on and despised the short-necked pliosaurs who functioned as the Samaritans?
That concrete idea provided the shovel I needed to dig into the nitty-gritty challenge of how to fit contextual details from Jesus’s parable into a story for both children and adults to enjoy. I read dozens of commentaries, and while there’s plenty of details that I wasn’t able to fit into the story, there are plenty: the Jews’ opposition to touching blood on account of its uncleanliness, the danger of additional bandits looking to double their profits by looting anyone who helped their first victim, and the personal loss incurred by the Samaritan as he helped the victim using his own resources, to name a few.
As a father of three (going on four) daughters, I want to be intentional with how they experience the world, and that means there are times for sheltering and times for exposing. While The Good Pliosaur is kid-friendly, it doesn’t shy away from the physical pain, abandonment, and emotional hurt that the characters experience. Life is not all blue skies (or seas), and I hope this book is a reminder to us all that life is beautiful and painful and very much worth the living because Jesus loved us while we were still sinners (Romans 5:8).
