Get acquainted with Shakespeare's classic tale of greed and revenge, in this light-hearted and amusing retelling. Bassanio is overjoyed when he finally gets to marry Portia. But, his happiness is short-lived when he is forced to defend his dear friend Antonio, who's in trouble with an old merchant - intent on getting his pound of flesh.

Sapphire/Band 16 books offer longer reads to develop children's sustained engagement with texts and are more complex syntactically.

Text type: Fiction from our literary heritage

Curriculum links: English: fiction from the English literary heritage

This book has been quizzed for Accelerated Reader.

This book is part of a book series called Collins Big Cat .

This book has been graded for interest at 9-10 years. This book is part of a reading scheme, meaning that it is a book aimed at children who are learning to read. This reading book uses the phonics method. This approach concentrates on teaching children how to map between sounds and spellings, allowing them to decode written words into their constituent sounds. Phonics skill thus involves being able to split the written word 'cat' into the phonemes /k/, /a/, /t/, and to map from letter 'c' to phoneme /k/, from letter 'a' to phoneme /ae/ and from letter 't' to phoneme /t/. Decoding skill is useful when reading unfamiliar words which use regular spelling sequences.

There are 56 pages in this book. This book was published 2017 by HarperCollins Publishers .

Collins UK has been publishing educational and informative books for almost 200 years. Jon Mayhew is a man with a dark imagination, who has always loved writing and storytelling. An English teacher (to children and teenagers) for twenty years, he now works as a specialist teacher for children with autism. He has four children himself and, when neither teaching nor writing, he plays in ceilidh bands and runs marathons. Jon lives between the ancient cities of Chester and Liverpool.