nerd teacher [books] reviewed Have a Hot Time, Hades! by Kate McMullan (Myth-o-Mania, #1)
It's hard to say this is a book meant for someone to *choose* to read.
1 star
Because my purpose was to read it to see how it'd work as recommendations for students learning English, a lot of my focus will be on how it succeeds in that manner. Personally, this book comes off like it was written to meet the requirements of a 'reading recovery' course or as part of a set of books meant to be used alongside 'leveled reading'. Or maybe more like something intended for a 'reading workshop' (which sounds like a good idea, but actually has a lot of flawed teaching around literacy in the curriculum that's been promoted via Lucy Calkins and her adherents).
That is to say: The story is trite. It's overly predictable (even for someone in the target audience of 9-13), and the narrative is completely lacking in anything that will pull someone in to engage them. I say that it's not good even for its target audience …
Because my purpose was to read it to see how it'd work as recommendations for students learning English, a lot of my focus will be on how it succeeds in that manner. Personally, this book comes off like it was written to meet the requirements of a 'reading recovery' course or as part of a set of books meant to be used alongside 'leveled reading'. Or maybe more like something intended for a 'reading workshop' (which sounds like a good idea, but actually has a lot of flawed teaching around literacy in the curriculum that's been promoted via Lucy Calkins and her adherents).
That is to say: The story is trite. It's overly predictable (even for someone in the target audience of 9-13), and the narrative is completely lacking in anything that will pull someone in to engage them. I say that it's not good even for its target audience because it mirrors the same stories that my students often complain about when their teachers hand them explicitly labeled leveled readers from publishers like Oxford, Pearson, and Usborne (the latter of which does actually publish engaging materials when they aren't focusing on "being educational," ironically).
With the way it reads, this book is very much one of those that was intended as part of those "educational" 'leveled readers', even though it has a lot of vocabularly that kids might struggle with ('brewski', which wasn't even common slang for a beer in 2011 in most English-speaking countries—they might've done well to use 'brew', which would've been more educational and closer to accurate for Ancient Greece); it includes things that are incomplete and presumes a lower level of intelligence on the part of their readers (the 'old Greek speak for' sections are very much in this vein).
Another tell that this is designed for one of those previously mentioned reading curricula is that the end has a "Discussion" section, which is hyper-common among leveled readers and also workshop-intended books. (Not to mention, the questions are always tedious and don't even really engage the reader with the content of the book except on an incredibly superficial level.)
Personally, there are some weird vibes that I get from this book that make me want to look into the author a bit more. And the publisher, though that might be more complex than the author.
Side note: The Underworld wasn't hot, so why the reference to Christian Hell for people who weren't?