PERSEUS

An accomplished illustrator with several biblical and classical retellings to his credit recounts the Greek myth about the hero who, with the gods' help, beheads the terrible Gorgon Medusa, then confronts the evil king who sent him on his dread errand with the head (snaky locks still writhing), thus turning him into stone. Hutton's prose is a less-than-graceful amalgam of colloquial phrasing with the odd vivid word (``thrashed''; ``screeched''), but at least he presents the traditional story, including the rescue of Andromeda, in a straightforward and accessible manner. His illustrations—the trademark hatching and delicate pen lines, the sparingly applied watercolors—are the book's best feature, the figures at once airily weightless and heroic, the clear and luminous Aegean light connoting the unsullied early world. (But why does the sun look like a fried egg?) An attractive edition of a great mythical adventure. (Mythology/Picture book. 7-10)