Hour of the Olympics

Mary Pope Osborne's Hour of the Olympics takes 7 year olds to ancient Greece on the opening day of the games, and lands them in an argument about fairness.

What happens

It comes late in the Magic Tree House run, but the first page catches you up. Jack and Annie are Master Librarians now. Morgan le Fay keeps sending them after stories that are about to be lost for ever, and this is the fourth one.

They land in an olive grove outside Olympia in tunics and sandals, with a research book and a secret library card each. Past the trees there are white tents, crowds, and 40,000 people who have travelled here for the festival.

Then Annie notices something. There are no girls. Anywhere.

A man with a short white beard comes over, looks straight at Annie and says his name is Plato. He is a philosopher, which he explains means a lover of wisdom. Annie asks what that means, because of course she does.

Plato takes them to the poet they've been sent to find, and she turns out to be a young woman who taught herself to read and write because girls were not sent to school. Her poem has to leave the country to be safe. She cannot even put her name on it.

And no, Annie is told, girls cannot go to the Olympics either.

That is the engine of the whole book. Annie says exactly what your reader will be thinking, out loud, to a famous philosopher, and Plato has no good answer for her. He says his country is a democracy and believes in freedom, and that right now that only means men. It is a lot of history to hand a seven year old, and it goes down easily because Annie is so cross about it.

Jack goes to the chariot races. He promises to take notes. Then he spots a soldier at the edge of the track who is short. Really short. A small hand comes out from under the cape and waves at him.

You can probably guess what happens next, and it does get frightening for a page or two. Guards take hold of Annie and the crowd starts shouting for her arrest while Jack fights his way down through the seats. Nobody is hurt, and the rescue when it comes is a proper goosebump moment, but a child who worries about people being in trouble may want you nearby for that bit.

What to read next

Fancy more ancient history with a clock running? Vacation Under the Volcano is the first of these four story-rescue trips, and it's here as well. Jack and Annie reach a Roman town on the morning it is about to be buried, with a library somewhere in it that they need to find.