Profile: Christine Vincent and Books for Catholic Kids

Welcome today, Guild Member Christine Vincent! Christine, tell us a little about yourself:

Born and raised in the North of Germany, I met my American husband while studying at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands. Soon after I had graduated with an MA in English Language and Literature, we moved to the US. We eventually settled on the Washington Coast where we converted to Catholicism and became rebel homeschoolers. At present, we are parents of eight and grandparents of three. We are members of the Byzantine Catholic Eparchy of the Holy Protection of Mary in Phoenix, Arizona. This eparchy (diocese) spans the entire Western United States.

I began freelance writing and translating in college and continued to work in the fields occasionally when my children were young. In 2010, I began to work part-time at our local public library. I also started writing for online platforms and for a couple of local magazines. In 2018, I launched my website Books For Catholic Kids with the dual purpose of offering a reliable source of book recommendations and reviews for Catholic parents and of promoting my husband’s children’s book Saint Rosaline, the Carthusian: The Saint With The Shining Eyes. 

Tell us about your website, Books For Catholic Kids. What inspired it? How does it work?

My heart and ministry live in my website Books For Catholic Kids, which I launched in 2018. The site offers age group-specific book lists, tips on where to find them, and a blog Stories of Books for Catholic Kids on which I post reviews and journal our self-publishing adventures with my husband’s children’s book St.Rosaline, The Carthusian: The Saint With The Shining Eyes. There is also a contributor’s feature and a book page for St. Rosaline.

As homeschooling parents, my husband and I found it hard to find good books for our children at any age level. I posted our definition of the kind of ‘good books’ we wanted our children to read on the site:

• A good book for Catholic children is well-written, preferably beautifully written. The way to teach children to recognize good literature is to immerse them in excellent writing while keeping them away from the bad and the mediocre. It works!​
• The book need not be written by a Catholic author but it should be compatible with Catholic spirituality and thought. ​
• Good books should tell stories, stories that nourish the soul and the imagination, fairy tales, stories from the past, the present and the future, stories of all genres and all cultures, stories that entertain. For children, these stories should be told from a world view compatible with Catholic thought to form their faith. Mature teens need to read about other world views to learn about them and compare them to Catholicism.
• Consider this quote by a Baptist minister: “You need to brainwash your kids. If you don’t, somebody else surely will.”

Working in our public library helped me find some good books. It also opened my eyes to the flood of occult, semi-pornographic and, make no mistake, anti-Catholic books in the library, especially in the Young Adult section. This category, by the way, is not defined by content but by Lexile score, by the difficulty of the text. The YA label does not indicate age-appropriate content. I also found that a disconcertingly large number of new books contain an evil or stupid minor character who is Catholic. It is a light but steady stream of manipulation and I believe that at this point in history even the authors are not aware of what they are doing.

I have found that good Catholic characters do not exist in contemporary secular fiction. Please email me the titles of books to prove me wrong. I am not being sarcastic. This is a sincere request. I am looking for them.

I had been playing with the idea about a website recommending Catholic children’s books for a while when my husband wrote his book. I did not know much about marketing other than that it was essential. I decided to build a promotional website which would contain additional information to give people a reason to visit. Books For Catholic Kids was born. I welcome guest posts and book suggestions as well as suggestions for improvement or additional features.

When I launched my site two years ago, I could hardly find any Catholic teen fiction. When I finally discovered the Catholic Writer’s Guild, and the Catholic Teen Books site, I was amazed at the quantity and quality of good books for young readers. My goal is to promote them as much as possible. I only wish I had more time to read all the different authors. So far, I have reviewed some of Teresa Linden’s books on my blog and will work on others soon.

During the last months, I had the pleasure to work on editing and promoting another book by a family member. Our seventeen-year-old daughter Anastasia just published a suspenseful, Tolkien-inspired teen fantasy novel, Adrastea: Book One in the Annals of Orbis. We were overwhelmed by the support on launch day and the enthusiastic reviews on Amazon.com.

As my kids are leaving home, I am looking for Catholic outlets to write for. Some of the topics I would like to discuss are the Eastern Catholic Churches, the rebuilding of Catholic culture, the importance of good books, the impact of fractured fairy tales and the occult in teen fiction,and poetry as the language of the Faith.

What do you hope others get from your writing?

I hope readers will find relevant information about good books, inspiration, and appreciation of good and beautiful things. I hope Catholics will realize the vital importance of screening their entertainment. I found that many parents, even good Christians who monitor their children’s entertainment in terms of movies and music, are not so diligent about their children’s reading. The idea that it is important to read and that we need to make allowances to attract our kids to books seems to override any qualms about content. I know parents cannot possibly read all the books their children want to read. I want to provide comprehensive lists, reviews, as well as links to other resources that will make it easy for parents to choose and obtain good books for their families.

Read the Vincent Family books:

St. Rosaline, the Carthusian: The Saint With the Shining Eyes by Mark Vincent

Adrastea, Book One In the Annals of Orbis by Anastasia Vincent

Follow Christine on Facebook: The Story of a Book