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EXCITEMENT is never a long time coming in a book by Terry Deary. He entrances kids by focusing on the horrible bits of history and he has recently pepped up the myth of Prometheus who stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans to use and abuse.
Published in January, The Fire Thiefbegins on a rocky summit in Ancient Greece where a great bird is about to peck the chained Prometheus to death, just as it has done for the past 200 years at the behest of cousin Zeus.
It's tough stuff but no tougher, perhaps, than fans of the Horrible Histories have come to expect.
Part two in the trilogy is just out and we'll have to wait for the climactic part three, although it's written of course. The astonishingly prolific Mr Deary, who lives in County Durham, can write much faster than publishers can publish.
Wrongly, I assumed that The Fire Thief and its follow-up marked a departure for the writer. "It's not a departure because I've written 164 books of which 80 are fiction," he says.
"People forget this because the Horrible Histories are so popular. What I suppose you could say is that this is an exciting new project going in a I direction I've never really...