Neither thumbs up nor thumbs down for Hour of the Olympics by Mary Pope Osborne. Children’s fantasy.
I appreciate the historical accuracy – good on Osborne for making sexism the major conflict in a book for little kids. But, man, you need to be really little to enjoy the prose. It feels like it’s been filtered through a committee to drain it of all artistic verve. Which, to be fair, is probably exactly what happened. But I disagree that simplicity and beauty are mutually exclusive; why should we train our five-year-olds to have tin ears, by providing them only with one-note examples of language?
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