Book: Roman Myths Vols 1 & 2 by Fiona McDonald

I initially felt that I wouldn't need to get any Roman mythology books for this project as we already had anthologies of Greek myths from which I could just change the names - but it turns out that I don't know as many minor Roman supernatural beings by their first names as I thought so I gave in and bought this set of two beautifully illustrated books.

I have justified it to myself that it is also better to actually be teaching stories from the correct culture, otherwise it is too tempting to get even further off-track from the actual Romans and start doing the Minotaur/Knossos etc.

Kane is currently enjoying the fictional "Beast Quest" book series and so has a solid appreciation for any kind of monster-slaying story in particular - unfortunately these books seem to oddly swerve a lot of the well known "best bits" of mythology, eg: including the story of "Hercules and the Giant" rather than mentioning the existence of the twelve tasks/Nemean Lion, and mentioning navigating between Scylla/Charibdys very much in passing in a much less exciting long ship's itinerary of people and places.

I genuinely don't understand why it has been written this way, unless it turns out that these are actually trying to be direct paraphrasings of original texts (which I strongly doubt) - it can't be to protect the innocence of children as the book still happily describes squeezing someone's neck until their eyeballs pop out and has a whole chapter on the "Theft" of the Sabines. (Incidentally, it turns out that it *is* possible to turn the Sabine incident into a charming children's story about tolerance, in the most tortured total rewrite since the "Pirates respect other people's property!" signs I once saw in a children's cloakroom).

I consider learning Classical mythology a vital life skill for understanding references in art and literature as well as history, and it enlivens a museum or art gallery trip to know the (usually blood-thirsty) stories behind the various figures carved on the endless stones/painted in the endless pictures on display, so I was a bit disappointed in these books by the time we had read them both through and hadn't covered the basic relationships between Gods and eg: that Neptune carries a trident, Minerva has a helmet and an owl, Bacchus usually wears grapes on his head, etc etc.