• Title: Pompeii: Lost & Found
•  Author: Mary Pope Osborne
  
• Illustrator: Bonnie Christensen
  
• Age Range: 3 - 7 years
• Grade Level: Preschool - 2
• Lexile Measure: 980L
• Hardcover: 40 pages
• Publisher: Knopf Books for Young Readers (January 10, 2006)
• Language: English (Amazon.com)

Synopsis:

The day that Mount Vesuvius exploded is a day that made history and entombed an entire town. Thousands of years later, archaeologists have worked at unveiling the daily life in this Roman town and readers get a glimpse of what it may have been like on that fateful day.

 Review:

This was an interesting book. I chose it because natural disasters like this one always fascinated me as a kid and I think that kids who are interested in archaeology, volcanoes, or ancient civilizations would be interested in this book. The illustrations are whole-page sized, with a short paragraph located on every second page. Illustrations have an "aged" look that lends authenticity to the feel of the story, such as this one:

The bottom right of the page shows some ancient tools that were used. One thing that I really liked about this book (even though it made me extremely sad) is that it didn't shy away from harder topics like slavery and death: " The plaster shapes reveal family members huddled together, their faces twisted with pain and fear" (Osborne, 10) and "One shape reveals a watchdog, struggling to break free from his chain" (Osborne, 10). These descriptions are of bodies that left shapes behind in the ashes they were covered in. By using plaster, the archaeologists were able to create statues out of the impressions left behind from the lost people.

I even learned that being a gladiator wasn't as glamorous a job as I'd always pictured, "The most famous people of Pompeii were a special group of slaves and prisoners-- the gladiators" (Osborne, 16). I never knew that gladiators were actually slaves...or that out of a town of 20,000 people...8,000 were slaves (Osborne, 16).

 

The last two pages give a lesson on how frescoes are made and answers to questions posed throughout the book. I didn't see a bibliography page, but there was an "Acknowledgements" page at the back of the book. I learned a lot about Pompeii through this book and it changed from just being an "event" in history, to being a civilization with actual people.