BOOK ONE · A CHRISTIAN FAMILY READING COMPANION

An adventure that
opens the door
to Scripture.

Long lives. Costly love. Courage when answers run out. Sardis McCoy and the Stolen Years gives families a starting point for reading the Bible and talking about what matters.

Explore the biblical connections

For Christian parents, homeschool families, and reading groups · Ages 10–14

Sardis and Athena on the cover of Sardis McCoy and the Stolen Years, Book 1, by Mark Crowley. — A hidden world. Questions worth asking.

A NOTE FROM MARK CROWLEY

Why I wrote Sardis McCoy.

I began developing this story about fifteen years ago, before I became a father. In the conversations surrounding Harry Potter’s popularity, I heard parents wrestle with questions about witchcraft, imagination, and the messages children take from books. Those conversations stayed with me. I wanted to write an exciting adventure rooted in contemporary childhood that would also encourage young readers to think seriously about faith.

I have long admired C.S. Lewis and the way he used imaginative stories to illuminate Christian truths. Love, sacrifice, and resurrection could become ideas a reader felt as well as understood. I hoped to bring that spirit into a world that felt familiar: school, friendship, family, and an ordinary boy suddenly facing extraordinary questions.

With Sardis McCoy, I wanted to invite readers to look again at things they might have dismissed too quickly—including the Bible’s accounts of people who lived for centuries. The story also imagines connections among Greek and Roman mythology, lost civilizations, and mysteries such as the Bermuda Triangle. These possibilities belong to the novel’s fictional world, but the curiosity behind them is real: What do we actually know? What have we assumed? What might we understand differently if we asked another question?

My Christian faith shaped the story’s deeper themes, particularly self-giving love, mortality, and the hope of new life. Without giving away the ending, Sardis’s choices carry intentional echoes of sacrifice and renewal. I was also drawn to Genesis’s account of Adam and Eve and to Paul’s contrast between death in Adam and life in Christ. The fuller comparison is explored in the marked spoiler section below.

I wrote from the conviction that Scripture deserves to be taken seriously and that thoughtful questions can strengthen faith. My hope is that readers will enjoy the adventure, then open their Bibles with fresh interest—and that parents and children will find something worth talking about together.

Mark CrowleyAuthor of Sardis McCoy and the Stolen Years

START WITH WHAT IS ON THE PAGE

Genesis, curiosity, and long lives.

DIRECT BIBLICAL REFERENCE · CHAPTERS 5–6

At the park, Athena names Methuselah, Noah, and the early generations in Genesis. On the drive to Corpus Christi, she lists five lifespans. Each number matches the biblical account:

Lifespans named in Chapter 6
Person	Years	Read the passage
Adam	930	Genesis 5:5
Seth	912	Genesis 5:8
Jared	962	Genesis 5:20
Methuselah	969	Genesis 5:27
Noah	950	Genesis 9:29

Athena wonders whether Antgeria could be connected, but admits she was not there. Isaiah calls the comparison interesting, rather than proof. The story invites readers to return to the text and distinguish a recorded lifespan from an imagined explanation.

Ask together: What does Genesis actually say, and what has the novelist imagined around it?

DISCUSSION PARALLEL · CHAPTERS 5–6

Questions can lead to careful reading.

“I expect you to question everything I’m telling you,” Athena says. Her lesson about people understanding different parts of a walrus reinforces humility about incomplete knowledge.

1 Thessalonians 5:19–22 calls for testing prophetic claims and holding on to what is good. Families can use that call to discernment as a lens for Sardis’s questions; the novel does not quote the passage.

Ask together: How can we examine a confident claim without confusing confidence with truth?

SHARED IMAGERY · CHAPTER 7

A glimpse of leviathans.

While discussing Atlantis’s old defenses, Athena begins to connect accounts of mermaids and leviathans with its hidden history. Samson cuts her off. The word offers a link to the creature imagery in Job 41 and Psalm 104:26. Book One does not identify those defenses as the Bible’s Leviathan.

Ask together: How do the Bible’s descriptions of the sea encourage wonder and humility about creation?

MAJOR ENDING SPOILERSPrayer, sacrificial love, and the years aheadOpen after reading, or if you are a parent previewing the story.

PRAYER IN THE STORY · CHAPTER 27

Hope beside the hospital bed.

“Now we wait. And watch. And pray.”Jennifer, as Sardis’s treatment begins

Jennifer’s words place prayer alongside medical care and the family’s fear. Philippians 4:6–7 offers a companion reading about bringing our requests to God. That passage is a suggested reading, not a quotation in the novel.

Ask together: What can prayer look like when we cannot control the outcome?

DISCUSSION PARALLEL · CHAPTERS 26–28

The courage to care for someone else.

Sardis says he would want to help even if only the boy with the Yankees cap needed saving. His willingness to risk himself gives families a way to discuss Jesus’s teaching about costly love in John 15:13 and loving our neighbor in Mark 12:30–31.

Ask together: How can we put another person’s good first in ordinary, safe choices? Sardis’s medical risk is an exceptional fictional crisis, not something young readers need to imitate.

EXPLICIT CHRISTIAN REFERENCES · CHAPTER 28

Jesus, Saint Peter, and questions about death.

After Sardis’s heart restarts, Kale asks whether he saw Jesus or Peter. Isaiah supplies “Saint Peter.” The boys also joke about “the bad place.” Sardis remembers voices and is unsure whether he heard them or dreamed; he does not report a confirmed vision of heaven.

For context, Matthew 16:18–19 connects Peter with the keys of the kingdom. The familiar image of Peter as heaven’s gatekeeper is a cultural tradition; that scene is not described in this passage.

Ask together: Which ideas about heaven come from Scripture, and which come from jokes, pictures, or popular culture?

DISCUSSION PARALLEL · EPILOGUE

More years, or a life well lived?

Sardis learns that his slower aging will change the future he expected with his mother and friends. Psalm 90:12 invites readers to think about using their days wisely. The epilogue does not quote this verse, and Antgeria’s extended lifespan is not the same as the Christian promise of eternal life.

Ask together: What would make a day valuable, whether we had seventy years or seven hundred?

THE AUTHOR’S INTENDED ALLUSIONS · THE ENDING

Sacrifice, death, and a renewed future.

Mark intended Sardis’s willingness to risk his life for others, his return from the brink of death, and his changed future to echo Christian themes of self-giving love and new life. Jesus’s sacrifice and resurrection inspired that pattern. Sardis’s recovery and slower aging are the story’s imaginative expression of those themes; the Christian promise of eternal life reaches beyond the extended years of this fictional world.

The author also connects the story’s questions about mortality with Adam and Eve’s disobedience, the warning about death in Genesis 2:16–17, and the return to dust and loss of access to the tree of life in Genesis 3:19–24. Paul brings death in Adam and resurrection in Christ together in 1 Corinthians 15:21–22. These are the author’s thematic connections, rather than passages quoted or explained by the novel.

Ask together: What does Sardis’s story help us feel about sacrifice and a second chance? How does the Bible’s promise of life in Christ go further?

A NOTE FOR PARENTS

Faith, fantasy, and the conversation between them.

The novel includes Greek and Norse mythology, advanced technology, and people called “Deities.” Within its fictional world, these are long-lived people whose technology helps explain some myths. The story does not establish Antgeria as the explanation for Genesis or identify the biblical God with Atlantis’s people.

Other religious touches include Kale’s VeggieTales joke in Chapter 5, expressions such as “God help her” and “thank God” in Chapters 4–5, and an “Oh, God” exclamation in Chapter 27. These are cultural references or expressions, rather than additional biblical teaching. A cookbook’s use of “Bible” in the prologue is not a Scripture reference.

A thoughtful adventure companion for Christian families who want to strengthen biblical literacy through shared reading, careful questions, and conversations about love and courage.

BEGIN TOGETHER

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Chapter references follow the current 28-chapter Book One manuscript. Scripture links open Bible Gateway’s NIV text in a new tab; families may use their preferred translation. This companion adds no passages to the novel.