Treasury of Egyptian Mythology: Classic Stories of Gods, Goddesses, Monsters & Mortals

Gr 5 Up—Ra spits on the ground and a goddess springs forth. A devoted wife holds a flower so her husband may inhale the scent and a baby appears among the petals. A woman mourns and fertile farmland turns to dust. Prolific storyteller Napoli brings the ancient Egyptian gods to life for modern readers—their jealousies, passions, and grief are the driving forces in tales that explain creation, the seasons, the afterlife, and natural phenomena. Napoli's tone is swaying and intimate, earthy and incantatory, as if she were spinning tales aloud. "In the beginning…ah, many stories open that way." Sentences are fragmented, phrases are repeated, and wonderfully descriptive images are drawn from the physical world: tinkling jewelry, "thorns of anger," hot winds carrying grinding sand. Balit's glowing illustrations combine the flat, frontal style of ancient tomb paintings with flowing, graceful shapes. Curiously, the artist has chosen a very light skin tone for most of the Egyptians—both divine and human-in her paintings, with no explanation offered. Text pages are adorned with patterned borders, textured margins, and scattered stylized stars in gold. These effects, combined with stiff paper and a color palette drawn from semiprecious stones and metals, lend the book a weighty, sacramental quality. A lyrical retelling of the braided, interwoven, sometimes contradictory stories from the land of the Sphinx.—Paula Willey, Baltimore County Public Library, Towson, MD