Nonfiction Monday - Code Quest: Heiroglyphs, written by Sean Callery, illustrated by Jurgen Ziewe - review

 

Here's what I wrote when I reviewed this title for School Library Journal:

Fans of Ancient Egyptian history or readers of Rick Riordan's The Kane Chronicles will delight in learning to decode Egyptian heiroglyphs for themselves in this interactive work of nonfiction. A first-person mystery story narrated by an Indiana Jones-like archaeologist provides a slender thread upon which is 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 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 heiroglyphics on a computer - not a game. A determined reader will sift through the cacophony of clues to decode all the heiroglyphic and pictographic messages, but the design clutter and tiny typefaces will cause all but the most obsessed codebreakers to give up.

 

For Pink Me, I have only this to say: "MY EYES! OH GOD MY EYES!"

Nonfiction Monday is graciously hosted this week by Simply Science.