I can't begin a review of this title without commenting on the delight I felt when I first opened it, due to the content but also the experience. By that I mean the quality of the thick, black pages decorated with backdrops of starry skies and interspersed with images of great astronomers and far-away objects. As Rachel Beth Cunning says in her preface, this novella is for those who are enthusiasts both of Latin and the wider world up there, which given the classical attributions of most celestial objects, is quite a few of us!
With a working vocabulary of just 133 words required, this novella is easily accessible for most curious but not yet examination-level students. The grammar is centred around noun and verb endings in their most common forms, and whilst there are ablatives (which my Cambridge Latin Course students don't cover until their examination years), they are usually with prepositions which aid understanding rather than hinder it. The macrons are a helpful addition and can be used to encourage students who are interested in reading Latin aloud.
As a teacher in a girls’ secondary school, I very much liked how the first double page centres on Maria Mitchell – an astronomer from the 19th century who made a name for herself discovering astronomical objects including comets. Through her we go on to learn about the features of the solar system, including some well-researched scientific concepts and plenty of mythological characters.
The text is large, the paragraphs are short and broken up by scientific and archaeological images, giving the reader plenty to do but without overwhelming them. In the mythological sections there is speech; useful both for practising first and second person endings as well as enticing us in to learn about how the planets and constellations came to be formed. Where Cunning has used modern vocabulary to define something not within the Roman vernacular, she has glossed the words, providing students with an easy way to understand some complex vocabulary as well as consider how and why the author has chosen the Latin word she has used for a particular concept.
I am not currently a great user of novellas with my students but I have some students in mind already who would greatly benefit from this sort of reading task and I am excited to incorporate these sorts of works into my classroom from now on.
Open access
