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

This book could have been great: National Geographic, well designed, beautifully illustrated, good coverage, and lots of information... unfortunately the writing is atrocious. The author makes too much of an effort to add her own "literary color" and the editor was asleep at the wheel with the result of overwhelming the actual myths with fluff.A typical passage: "But she was defiant. Though she was not beside Usir physically, she was beside him in thoughts. The last night they were together, he had said she was like the welcome north wind on the hottest days. He called her the sweet wind that refreshes, and that new name now lived around her as an aura. It brushed her cheek so softly that she couldn't help but turn her face toward it, like a babe turns to meet the source of food. She felt more enlivened with each day. Yes, she could manage in this life -- yes, this was good."Definitely read a few pages before buying, in case to your liking, or better yet skip entirely.

I bought this because the illustrations are beautiful, but I am appalled at the writing and as I read aloud to my students, I’m constantly editing sentences to make them make sense. It’s full of sentence fragments that I suspect the author thought would make it more like poetry, but it ended up instead as a choppy, nonsensical mess.“The cosmos was ordered perforce. The order of a dot, a circle, a sphere, without beginning or end. Utter consistency. Perfect order. But something there is that doesn’t like order. Order can be tolerated temporarily, but on and on like that? Infinite order? How unutterably intolerable. Boring, really.”It’s really quite awful writing, and requires a lot of mental gymnastics to follow the narrative at all. I’m surprised no editor wanted to fix it up, but I suspect they might have been convinced that it was so-called “evocative prose,” which, to my mind, usually means the author is more concerned with sounding poetic than making sense. It’s a cross between very pretentious prose and trying to sound like a modern story-teller, and it fails at both.I do love the artwork and we spend a lot of time talking about the beautiful illustrations, but I won’t be buying more from this series because the writing is so off-putting.

I purchased this book as part of a study requested by my 3rd grader for homeschooling. We read this book together, and I'm glad we do, because I am learning right along with her. The way the book is written is really cool. It is written like a story, but yet broken into sections of the different Gods/Goddesses. It is fun to read the Egyptian Myths of creation, and also learn about each deity individually. Since this book was suggested when I was searching for Egyptian Mythology for kids, I assumed it would be written for kids to read themselves. However, the way it is written is a bit too advanced for a grade school-aged child to read on his/her own. There are some advanced concepts and language used that I often have to describe to my daughter. That aside, we both enjoy this book. It is a beautiful hard cover, with many pictures and descriptions. It is most definitely not a one-time read for us, either. We will continue to enjoy this book in future studies, as well.

Our 9 year old daughter got into Mythology having read Edith Wharton's "Mythology." We bought her several of these books, which were cheaper on Amazon than at Costco. The pictures which fill full pages throughout the entire book on every page are beautiful. This book is not only for reading about mythology but teaches children to examine the art as well as the written word, something we have lost sight of.

My daughter loved this! She would beg to "do her reading." I purchased the audio book with it so that she could listen while she read along, especially since it has lots of Egyptian names that I had no idea how to pronounce. She read it through once with the audio and now likes to go back and read her favorite parts on her own. Very educational for both of us!