The book of wizards

Gr 3-8-In this story collection, Hague loosely defines "wizard" as anyone with magical powers: sorcerer, shaman, or witch. The selections range from well-known tales like "Baba Yaga" to the lesser-known story of the early life of Taliessen and the Icelandic folktale of the Black School, clearly a Hogwarts precursor. He even takes on Shakespeare's The Tempest and the story of Circe and Odysseus. Hague favors ornate language, so readers will need to cope with vocabulary like "fortuitous," "arboreal," and "lithesome" with little syntactical support. Full-page illustrations are brilliantly colored and feature characters with shockingly malevolent eyes, ramping up the drama of the stories. Readers who expect the illustrations to match the text precisely will note that Baba Yaga's dress of "grayish-brown homespun" morphs to red and gold in the illustration and that a dragon's "serrated" teeth are actually individual sharp points. Storytellers will find a lot of good material here, and lovers of magical battles of yore will find plenty to enjoy, too, and may even pick up a few thrilling new epithets: "you pock-faced, craven doer-of-evil-in-the night."-Ellen Heath, Easton Area Public Library, Easton, PA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.