Echo Echo: Reverso Poems About Greek Myths

by Marilyn Singer, Josée Masse (Illustrator)

Overview

A new book of unique reversible poems based on Greek myths from the creator of Mirror Mirror  
 
What happens when you hold up a mirror to poems about Greek myths? You get a brand-new perspective on the classics! And that is just what happens in Echo Echo, the newest collection of reverso poems from Marilyn Singer. Read one way, each poem tells the story of a familiar myth; but when read in reverse, the poems reveal a new point of view! Readers will delight in uncovering the dual points of view in well-known legends, including the stories of Pandora’s box, King Midas and his golden touch, Perseus and Medusa, Pygmalion, Icarus and Daedalus, Demeter and Persephone, and Echo and Narcissus.
 
These cunning verses combine with beautiful illustrations to create a collection of fourteen reverso poems to treasure.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780803739925
Publisher:	Penguin Young Readers Group
Publication date:	02/16/2016
Pages:	32
Sales rank:	362,148
Product dimensions:	10.10(w) x 10.10(h) x 0.50(d)
Lexile:	670L (what's this?)
Age Range:	6 - 9 Years

About the Author

Marilyn Singer is an award-winning author of more than 90 children’s books in a wide variety of genres. 

Josée Masse is a recognized artist in her native Canada, having illustrated numerous French and American picture books.

Editorial Reviews

Marilyn Singer's ingenious "reverso" poems are child-friendly feats of verbal pyrotechnics: They can be read from the top down or the bottom up, with just small changes of punctuation and capitalization. Reading in each direction yields a completely different meaning and point of view. Singer keeps the poems to a dozen or so mostly short lines, some just one word long, so they look spacious on the page and are easily accessible to younger child readers. Her first two collections, Mirror Mirror and Follow Follow, retold classic fairy tales. Now she's plunging into Greek mythology with Echo, Echo, and the results are just as much fun, no matter the age of the reader.

The New York Times Book Review - Maria Russo

★ 12/21/2015
Arachne, Icarus, Midas, and—as the title suggests—Narcissus are among the renowned Greek figures who feature in Singer and Masse’s third collection of “reverso” poems, which are intended to be read both forward and backward. “Wondrous!/ How/ life-/like!/ There is nothing in this world/ so perfect,” says Pygmalion of his statue, Galatea. “There is nothing in this world/ like/ life!” reads Galatea’s accompanying poem. “How/ wondrous!” Masse’s acrylics, dominated by rich colors and vertical symmetries, evoke weathered frescoes. The Minotaur appears prominently beside the poems for Theseus and Ariadne, half of its head transformed into a winding maze of golden thread, while the image paired with poems for Demeter and Persephone is divided into seasonal quadrants. Details about the myths appear across the bottom of the pages, further boosting the utility of another inventive exploration of stories readers thought they knew. Ages 6–9. Author's agent: Brenda Bowen, Sanford J. Greenburger Associates. Illustrator’s agent: Lori Nowicki, Painted Words. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

A New York Public Library Best of the Year pick
An SLJ Best Book of the Year
A Nerdy Book Club Award winner


* "Another inventive exploration of stories readers thought they knew." — Publishers Weekly

* "A witty, seductive pairing of poetic imagination and artistic vision." — School Library Journal

"A visual and interpretive feast bringing timeless tales to a young audience." — Kirkus Reviews

"A wonderful addition to poetry collections andaccompaniment for the myths."—  Booklist

"Marilyn Singer’s ingenious ‘reverso’ poems are child-friendly feats of verbal pyrotechnics" — The New York Times

"The perfect supplement or introduction to Pandora, King Midas, Icarus, and the rest of the bunch of fantastically flawed gods, monsters, and mortals…easy and rewarding to read." — The Boston Globe

"Delightful...vivid, glowing." —The Wall Street Journal

"Mythology and Western civ curricula will grab greedily for this one." —BCCB

From the Publisher

12/01/2016
Gr 2–5—A brilliant practitioner of the eponymous poetic form conveys both the drama and pathos of myths that have entertained throughout the ages, while establishing that there are two sides to every story. Full-page artwork, bathed in dazzling blue and gold tones, sets the stage for these timeless tales of gods and mortals told with a poignant and commanding lyricism.

School Library Journal

2015-11-03
Poetic portraits of well-known figures from Greek mythology. Picking up where they left off with their "reverso" renderings of classic fairy tales (Follow Follow: A Book of Reversos, 2013, etc.), poet Singer and illustrator Masse take on Greek myth, choosing some of the most famous legends to explore from multiple perspectives. In 2010, Singer created the provocative reverso form, in which—not unlike an extended palindrome—a lyric poem presents a portrait and then recasts it backward, line by line, in a companion poem. The complicated fates of the dozen mythic figures portrayed here, among them Arachne, Midas, Demeter, and Persephone, lend themselves particularly well to this reflective form, and Masse's gorgeous acrylics, richly stylized in blues and gold, effectively capture the dualistic nature of the reverso form. Here, curious Pandora, forever blamed for unleashing untold evils into the world when she "opened that darn box," gets a sympathetic reprieve when the story flips: "She let loose those evils, / but / she didn't collect them. / She gets the blame. / No matter that / it might have been great Zeus's game." The myth of "Eurydice and Orpheus," though, again hinging on succumbing to desire, here relies rather too heavily on the narrative note at the bottom of the page to convey the tragic plot to young readers. In all, though, a visual and interpretive feast bringing timeless tales to a young audience. (Picture book/poetry. 8-12)

Kirkus Reviews