Bull by David Elliot
Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, [2017]
185 p. ; 22 cm.
This Bull gives you a wild ride! It's a whip-smart retelling of the Minotaur myth, told in structured poetic forms but with the tone and attitude of hip-hop.
Well, it's a pretty bizarre myth to begin with - a king slights Poseidon who causes his wife to fall for a bull and she ends up giving birth to a half-human, half-bull monster. Elliot runs with it with a bit of street language that might be too rough for middle-schoolers but should intrigue high-schoolers.
At the end of the book he explains the various poetic forms he used for each character - it's a study in prosody worth reading.
It's not a book for every taste, but I'll recommend it to students looking for something mythology based or who like hip-hop influenced writing.
