Zoonauts: The Secret of Animalville is the freshest children's novel I've read in decades! It begins with a gangbuster science fiction "school report" by Jen, the teen youth of the Stroud Family - the "keepers" of Animalville. Through an incredible story by a talking parrot we learn the secret of this top-secret research facility for very smart animals.
It was only September, but Jen could see it was already turning into a bad school year. Perhaps it was fun for her younger brother, Cody, but having animals cooking, cleaning and doing taxes made it so hard to have any friends. Plus the whole place was top secret! How could she NOT tell even her best friend Sara anything about her family?
Truth is, no children had ever grown up in the kind of family as the Strouds. While their non-human nursemaids took care of them and taught them things no human children had learned, Jen was getting tired of telling other girls that they couldn't visit her at home. Oh, sure, she went to their places, but usually with some animal, watching everything she did. She felt like she was being spied on. It was too much to bear. Jen was deep in gloom as she left school that day. But you are certain to have a smile on your face as you read this amazing tale. The text, by renowned Hollywood scriptwriter Richard Mueller, is illustrated by Dal Chele - known for Scooby Doo, Spiderman, Robocop, The Real Ghostbusters, Fat Albert and The Real Adventures of Johnny Quest, to name just a few!

Oh, this is a book with such potential that is ruined by presentation. The author has a unique view for a Western academic in that he taught in China, and there developed a vision of Egyptian seen in terms of Eastern brush caligraphy rather than Western or Middle Eastern pen calligraphy. But the presentation using a mid-Eighties computer fount designed by the author is so bad as to make the book virtually unusable for me. I really do hope he will reapproach the book with professional typographic help - if he is still in China, there must be many able to aid him.

If the reader simply wants to learn 'Egyptian' regardless of period or style, I must recommend J. P. Allen's Middle Egyptian. It is, of course, the language of a different period and uses heiroglyphics, not heiratic.

While the lessons are very good, clear and thoughtful, the images of the hieratic signs and the hieroglyphic bookhand are maybe the worst I've ever seen. Both were apparently done by hand and scanned in. Usually, I like that, but the resolution used was so low, it is sometimes hard to identify the actual signs. Readability is extremely poor, but no argument with the actual scholarship. There really is no competition for this otherwise very good book.

Wow, this is a really great study of Egyptian handwriting and makes it so easy to teach myself how to write like an Egyptian.