Accessible and entertaining, these stories provide a thoughtful, fresh take on a classic subject.
Seventeen lesser-known Greek myths get energetic retellings in this collection for readers 12 and up.
Many YA readers are familiar with the immortals of Olympus from works like D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths, but the same tales tend to get repeated, leaving out variations, contradictions, or plots with less appeal to modern audiences. Barrett (On Etruscan Time, 2015, etc.), a prolific writer of YA fiction, returns to the classical setting she employed in books like King of Ithaka (2014) to explore these less-told tales. Her framing story, which she uses to good effect, is that Orpheus has been turned into a rock after failing to bring his wife, Eurydice, back from the land of the dead, having broken the proscription to turn and look at her. He can see her again, and apologize for his stupidity, only if he can tell 300 stories (that the listener has never heard) within 3,000 years. And right now, he explains, there are just 17 more to go. These are grouped in four main categories: “Where Things Come From”; “Life’s Big Moments: Birth, Love, Death”; “Gods and Humans”; and “Creatures You Never Knew About.” Two appendices and a glossary supply helpful background information. Orpheus’ narration adds a welcome contemporary note to these 17 wide-ranging tales. They include (for example) the stories of two mischievous brothers who tease Hercules for his sunburned bottom and are transformed into the world’s first monkeys; a handsome farmer who tricks a beautiful girl into marriage through a message on an apple; a giant bronze robot; and a goddess who grants her idea of immortality to a mother by killing the woman’s sons while they’re still “young and beautiful and admired by all.” Orpheus sometimes deftly reflects on these tales for today’s audience, as with the last: “Did Kydippe thank the goddess? Or did she curse her and refuse to worship her again? Herodotus…doesn’t say.” Barrett, too, adds comments after some of the engaging tales that provide further information, food for thought, or acknowledge modern viewpoints.
Accessible and entertaining, these stories provide a thoughtful, fresh take on a classic subject.Pub Date: July 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5351-4450-6
Page Count: 140
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Decades after the events of The Forest of Hands and Teeth (2009), teenager Gabry lives in relative safety. Despite the Barrier keeping the ravaging zombies out of town, Gabry is a terrified homebody who wants only to stay sheltered with her mother, the refugee heroine of Forest. Her nervousness is justified; when Gabry is peer-pressured into sneaking past the Barrier for a night of adolescent rebellion, several of her friends are zombified. (One wonders, if teens sneaking out for a snog is so dangerous to society, how there any humans left at all.) The ensuing chaos sends Gabry into the wilderness where, encumbered by revelations about love and family, she encounters zombie-worshiping cultists, the dangerous remnants of the army and her own past. Whatever comes between Gabry and her mother, there’s one thing they definitely have in common: Like her mother, Gabry experiences an angst-ridden, gloomy love triangle while fleeing from zombie hordes in the forest’s depths. Fast-paced despite the mawkish romance, it will be gobbled up by fans of the first volume like brains. (Horror. 12-14)
Pub Date: March 9, 2010
ISBN: 970-0-385-73684-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
Karr (The Cave, 1994, etc.) chooses the silent film studios during WW I as a backdrop for twin adolescent film stars Fitzhugh and Nelly Dalton's discovery of a ring of German sympathizers. Although their father's suspicious death in the explosion of a munitions dump has forced the twins and their mother to move out of Manhattan, things are looking up for the scrappy family. Fitzhugh and Nelly will star in a new film serial, In the Kaiser's Clutch, written and sold to the studio by their mother. The twins eventually uncover their leading man as the brains behind a secret German bomb factory. By juxtaposing plot summaries of each serial installment at the opening of every chapter and then describing all the hard work that goes into the segments, Karr accurately recreates the early film industry, and those who can give themselves up wholeheartedly to some of the campier aspects of this will have a ball. The plot is stuffed with cornball jokes, wooden dialogue, and clichÇd happy family scenes; the German characters are reduced to thick-accented, shifty-eyed, bravado-spouting villains, and the novel ultimately becomes as jingoistic as the fictional serial at its core. (Fiction. 12-14)
Pub Date: Oct. 25, 1995
ISBN: 0-374-33638-5
Page Count: 182
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1995
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