Hieroglyphs

Gr 3—7—Persistent children can learn to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs in this interactive work. A first-person mystery story narrated by an Indiana Jones-like archaeologist provides a slender thread on which are hung multitudes of sidebars, factoids, captioned photos, graphic text elements, maps, and diagrams. Photos of Egyptian artifacts and sites are reasonably plentiful, but of such small size that they can be difficult to appreciate. The illustrations that accompany the archaeologist's story are rendered digitally, employing exaggerated perspective and texture mapping, which gives the book a video-game effect. The accompanying CD, however, includes a font for making one's own hieroglyphics on a computer—not a game. Determined readers will sift through the cacophony of clues to decode all the hieroglyphic and pictographic messages, but the design clutter and tiny typefaces will cause all but the most obsessed code breakers to give up.—Paula Willey, Baltimore County Public Library, Towson, MD