I knew that "Mixed Up Masterpieces - Funny Faces" would be a huge hit with Charlotte, but I hadn't quite realised just how impressed she'd be with this one.
Though squarely aimed at younger children with a beautifully presented format, this book introduces history to kids in a hugely fun way.
Riffing on that classic game you've probably played yourself where two people take it in turns to draw a tiny portion of a face before handing it on to the next person, this book divides a huge series of interesting statues, masks and busts into three sections (top, middle and bottom of the head) so that you can mix and match up to 2000 different combinations, coming up with some truly hilarious new fizzogs.
Needless to say, it's actually more fun making new and crazy combinations than it is finding the actual proper matches for each face in this book, but there's a very handy historical guide at the back if you get stuck and want to see each of the faces as originally intended (small point of crit here, it would have been nice for this section to have been clearly marked with left page / right page so you could guess which side of the book to start on for proper face matching - just a small point of frustration for younger readers that could have been tweaked a tad).
It truly is an amazing and inspirational look at some of the amazing items in the British Museum collection, and we're always completely fascinated by faces and in particular masks whenever we've visited museums. We were so impressed that we set to making our own versions of that fantastic Mexican mosaic mask (quite terrifying but very awesome indeed).
A truly brilliant book!
Charlotte's favourite "Face" - The Egyptian Sarcophagus.
Daddy's favourite "Face" - The Robin Halloween Mask.
(Kindly supplied for review)
"Mixed Up Masterpieces - Funny Faces" is out now, published by Nosy Crow / British Museum.