View source for Spot the Mistake: Lands of Long Ago by Amanda Wood, Mike Jolley and Frances Castle

{{infobox2
|title=Spot the Mistake: Lands of Long Ago
|author=Amanda Wood, Mike Jolley and Frances Castle
|reviewer=John Lloyd
|genre=Children's Non-Fiction
|summary=History is not only in the minor detail, but it is as far as these pages are concerned.  I defy you to spot them all.
|rating=4.5
|buy=Yes
|borrow=Yes
|pages=48
|publisher=Wide Eyed Editions
|date=May 2017
|isbn=9781847809636
|website=http://www.francescastle.com/
|video=
|aznuk=1847809634
|aznus=1847809634
|cover=1847809634
}}
 
You'll like as not have seen a children's book before and harangued it for containing errors.  This book has at least two hundred, and that's not a problem.  Yes, in personifying the idea of learning through your mistakes, we get ten large dioramas of historical activity, all containing twenty things that shouldn't be there.  Your task, should you choose to accept it, is to try and find them all.  And the learning is also here, as we get text to tell us what the goofs were designed to show us.  Make no mistake, this is a clever and absorbing read…
 
(Here comes an obligatory spoiler alert – although perhaps that's not so expected, considering this is for the under-tens…)
 
The dioramas are suitably cartoonish, and detailed, without being over-bearing.  They certainly look different, as they should be, as we move from the Stone Age up to the era of the pirates, via Rome, Greece, India and so on.  Here's the Han dynasty court, here's a European jousting field.  And all those errors need picking out.  Some are obvious – satellite dishes (''what are those, mummy?'' asks the child of an online, downloading family), dinosaurs, jet planes – but a lot more are harder to find (and not only because they vanish down in the fold between the two pages).  Some are for those young with an inkling of general knowledge – the Chinese script on the Greek statue, for one.  A lot however take common sense and/or an eagle-eye to be found.
 
The good thing about this format is, however, that it is entertaining, and educational throughout.  The 'puzzles' look like they could be used for any age, but the writing on the reverse – 'the truth' as it were – is in small font, and probably for some competent readers only.  But both image and text is informative.  If you turn over and see the writing tell you what was wrong, it more often than not points out what was right, and lo and behold that had been staring you in the face.  The pirate's passport is wrong, his letter of marque is right; the Indian with a tattoo is an anachronism, but the henna variant not so.
 
This is a book with enough depth to it to even teach me something, which is my standard test – I had no idea babies in the Mayan empire were 'trained' to be cross-eyed.  But it has to be mentioned, I do wonder if it doesn't contain some accidental mistakes.  Doesn't the first image have not twenty but 22 errors in it – are bows and arrows and gold medallions really expected of Stone Age hunters?  Was there really an Egyptian cartouche looking like a dripping shower?  I don't know.  I wish the book too had told us when pizzas were invented, as while I guessed it was a deliberate fault I'm left wanting more (and more pizza…)  On the whole, however, the background information and the foreground details we've been tasked to find are right on the ball.  I am aware of an older book I won't name with exactly the same premise, but I won't make the mistake of deflecting attention from this more than competent publication.
 
I must thank the publishers for my review copy.
 
[[Diary of a Time Traveller by David Long and Nicholas Stevenson]] is a basic grounding in history too, with things to spot on each page.
 
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[[Category:Amanda Wood]]
[[Category:Mike Jolley]]
[[Category:Frances Castle]]
[[Category:Confident Readers]]