Coloring Your Prayers: An Inspirational Coloring Book for Making Dreams Come True

Although the inner child is somewhat passe, quaint books to appease it continue to appear. One of the most playful is Carolyn Manzi's Coloring Your Prayers: An Inspirational Coloring Book for Making Dreams Come True. Manzi encourages adults to put their prayers in action, beginning with the visualization that comes with creative activities, such as artwork. While the point that many adults have lost the uninhibited creativity of childhood is well taken, and the book is downright fun, Manzi's path to spiritual growth is too vague to be truly helpful. (Harmony, $17.95 192p ISBN 0-609-60621-2; Sept.) ~ Gift book publisher J. Countryman taps into Americans' fascination with the afterlife in Snapshots of Heaven, an inspirational title from Joyce Vollmer Brown. The art features landscapes and cozy domestic scenes, while Brown's text tells us what we want to hear--for example, we will be reunited with dear friends and family in heaven, our differences elided by an overarching love. Brown's sentiments and examples are strikingly similar to Elizabeth Phelps's 19th-century ruminations on heaven found in the Victorian classics The Gates Ajar and Beyond the Gates. All that's missing is the dog Phelps pictured, curled up on the front porch of one of heaven's tidy domiciles. ($9.99 128p ISBN 0-8499-5654-4; Sept.)