Olympic Review Series: Hour of the Olympics (The Magic Tree House #16) by Mary Pope Osborne

The Magic Tree House transports Jack and his younger sister Annie on another adventure into the past, this time back to the Olympics of Ancient Greece.  But in Ancient Greece, females are not allowed in the arena.  Annie tells Jack to go to the games without her, but Jack knows that Annie would not tell him to do that unless she had some kind of plan up her sleeve.  However, this is ancient Greece.  How is Annie going to pull this off?  And what does a flying horse have to do with anything?

I really liked this jaunt into the earliest days of the Olympics.  The similarities and differences from those early days in Greece to the 2012 Olympics in London are fun to discover.  I am a big fan of this series as a whole, anyway.  It is a "Magic School Bus" for middle grade fiction.  Sometimes by this reading level the imaginative stories are fewer.  In my opinion, imaginations need to be nourished as much as any other part of the mind.  Osborne manages to deftly combine the elements of imagination, curiosity, history, and mystery without it ever feeling trite or dumbed-down.


AGES: 8-12

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