McCaughrean rounds off her four volume “Heroes” series with Hercules (ISBN: 0-8126-2737-7, $15.95) and this rendition of Theseus’s larger-than-life feats and foibles. Taking the pitfalls of pride as her theme, she opens with King Aegeus disregarding the Delphic Oracle’s warning that a son would only bring him unhappiness. She closes with Theseus’s self-imposed exile after killing both his son’s mother and his wife. In between, she recounts in typically compelling prose this self-centered legend’s nearly effortless conquests of the giant Periphetes, the rhino-sized Crommyonian Boar, Procrustes and other foes, the Minotaur and Hippolyta, dark-skinned Queen of the Amazons, whose “arms were like the massive, entwined creepers of the jungle,” and who “moved like the oily black water of an African river.” Young readers of Robert Byrd’s Hero and the Minotaur (p. 768) will enjoy the fuller story here, and those who wonder why the ancient heroes are worth knowing will be richly answered. (Mythology. 10-12)
