Newbery winner or not, that was boring as hell.
It read like those tedious warmongering chapters in the Old Testament, with a dash of ancient mythology thrown into the mix. Hard to imagine a child of any age ever enjoying this, but I guess kids were different in1937.
To be fair though, I've never had any taste for mythology. I prefer books about characters I can identify with and care about. Nimrod, Bendeguz and Attila were definitely not characters I related to, had interest in, or muster compassion for. ( )

ASDH7890

Great mythic story about the Magyars and Attilla the Hun. ( )

Kate Seredy provides us with a more romanticized view of Hun ascendancy under Attila in the form of local Hungarian lore which typecasts him as a founding father of the Hungarian people. Seredy provides a mousakka of fact and fiction; ancient prophecies and ethnocentric battles to immerse the reader in a tale of prophecy and its realization.

Seredy avoids all the tellings of Lord of The Rings which emerges as a somewhat overdone hyperbole in comparison to 'The White Stag.' This might be a book with too much archaic language for young readers, but I thoroughly enjoyed it as a product of the hero and historical genre. ( )

Now that I’ve read it once, I feel like I need to read it again to give the book a fair evaluation. (But I don't really want to read it again, so... ay, there's the rub.) I spent the first half of the book struggling to find a direction. Ah, the river. Ah, the trees. Ah, the wind. The beauty that surrounds us, and the visions… I'm not a poetic person, and I know this. I know there's probably great crafting and art in those words, but I don't see it. All I really saw was: Psych! This is leading up to the birth and life of Attila the Hun. And he’s an a-okay guy! I didn't know anything about this book when I read it, so I may have been better served if I'd at least checked the back cover first. I'm too literal a person, and so reading it was a trip. ( )