Ashley Parr

The Mythic Playground Ashley Parr

Although it seems that reading aloud is no longer an activity that adults practise with any enthusiasm, this collection of ancient myths and monsters is to encourage reading aloud as a skill for children of all ages, no matter whether alone and in private, or as an entertainment for one's friends and family. Adults will appreciate the mix of humour, pathos and melodrama in these portrait-stories, together with flashes of literary wit; and the perceptive reader may well find that, surreptitiously embedded throughout, are quotations (from Chaucer, Keats, Tennyson, Joyce, Shakespeare, Milton et al. as well as those unacknowledged translators of the King James Bible), all surreptitiously concealed where least expected - like graffiti on an ancient monument.