Goddess Girls Super Special 2

After all these years, it's the final Goddess Girls book. Sigh. 

I was pleased the final was another super special. I still love that these are called super specials. Very BSC. However, I was not a fan of the plot. 

The girls argue over what exactly happened on Athena's first day at MoA, so they get the bright idea to travel back in time to see. Athena's spell goes awry and they end up 1,111 years in the future. In Rome. And meet their Roman counterparts. 

The girls have mixed feelings about Rome. Persephone is the most open-minded, interested in learning all she can before they leave. Athena and Minerva clash over how the Romans changed the Trojan War story. Artemis and Diana mostly get along, though Artemis is the most disturbed meeting someone so like her. Aphrodite and Venus like each other a lot, but Aphrodite feels Venus is better than her, as well as Mars being better than Ares. 

The book is mostly them checking out Roman culture, spending time with their counterparts, and then trying to figure out how to get home. 

It's not a bad book, but spending time away from MoA with brand new characters isn't what I wanted from a world I'm going to have to say goodbye to. I would have liked time with each of the past characters, even a brief cameo or mention on how they're doing. Just to wrap things up somehow. I'm going to miss Goddess Girls. It was a really fun series.

Goddess Girls 29

I love the Goddess Girls series, yet for some odd reason, I don't read them right away. I don't think I got through 27 until 28 had come out, but then I finished both quickly. This one I've had since November. 

The sad news is that this is the penultimate Goddess Girls book. They're going out with a bang in early September by releasing a second super special edition. The main girls time travel to back when Athena first started at MOA, but they end up in Rome instead. I'm looking forward to the Roman counterparts. Definitely not going to wait months to read that!

So who is Elpis? If you remember way back to Pandora's book about the "trouble bubbles," you'll remember the golden hope bubble. That's Elpis. After catching Zeus's attention, he offers her a 5-day trial at MOA with the chance to become the Spirit of Hope. He turns her into a golden girl who can make little bubbles appear on herself. She can also shapeshift back and forth between girl and bubble forms. 

Elpis has a lot to learn. She takes to being in human form pretty quickly, but she struggles with trying to do five classes, spend time on granting hope bubbles to mortals, deal with her fledgling crush on Moros, and deal with her rude roommate Apate. 

The new characters introduced in this book are all called spirits. I don't think they gave a distinction between a goddess/god and a spirit. I'm assuming spirits are immortal. They can do magic, same as the deities. 

Moros (the boy on the cover) is the spirit of gloom and doom in the book. Wikipedia calls him the spirit of impending doom and he can allow people to see their deaths. He's a son of Nyx, which makes the Fates his sisters, so there's a nice link there. 

Book Apate (the bright girl in the back) is the spirit of deceit and trickery. She's the personification of deceit in myth, and the daughter of Nyx and Erebus. 

Zelos is the spirit of rivalry. He's male in myth and Nike is one of his siblings. In the book, she has brown hair. 

Koalemos is the spirit of foolishness. In myth, he's another son of Nyx. In the book, she has silver hair. 

There is no set myth the authors are working from this time. None of these characters appear in a myth together. Zelos and Koalemos add absolutely nothing to the story. They're just Apate's henchwomen, basically, but the book would have been the same if they weren't in it. They're kinda fun though. 

Elpis is in ethicsology class on a team with Moros and Apate. A lot of the teachers are on vacation (or something), so there are guest professors. Socrates and sidekick Plato are running ethicsology. The class is divided up and each trio is given an ethical dilemma to present upon. Elpis is saddened to realize the people her team is in charge of are two men she sleepily sent hope bubbles to the night before...and may have encouraged them to go to war. It's the Peloponnesian War. Athens vs. Sparta. The two humans are Pericles and Lysander. She travels to Earth to meet with them and their whole argument is whether to perform a tradegy or a comedy and whether the costumes should be blue or red. Moros, who followed her, assists in coming up with a solution, so the war is ended. Sigh. Sure. 

Apate does nothing to help with the project except cause chaos, because her whole deal is wanting attention from her dad, the unscrupulous dude that runs the Be a Hero shop in the marketplace. She tries to sabotage both the project and Moros and Elpis's they're-not-admitting-it's-a-crush situation. Moros and Elpis save the project, but he does storm off after thinking he was a project to Elpis. 

Elpis is called to Zeus's office and he grants her the role of spirit of hope. Ms. Hydra (the secretary) made a mistake and gave Elpis five classes when she was only supposed to be in ethicsology and then doing her hope bubble thing and making friends. Zeus is understanding about her being overloaded and making mistakes. She's given her new title, plus she can pick three morning classes, and then work on her hope stuff for the rest of the day. She's also given a new empty room, so she can escape Apate. 

Moros and Elpis make up and they're really cute. I think they might actually have jumped to second favorite couple after Hades and Persephone. They've got a great opposites attract banter thing going on. 

Athena and Aphrodite have slightly larger supporting roles, as does Hades. A lot of the other characters make typical appearances. 

I really enjoyed this one. Elpis is a fun character and I did like meeting a bunch of the spirits, although not all of them were necessary for the plot. It was a nice way to introduce a few more newbies before we end the series with the four goddesses it began with. 

Goddess Girls 28

The 28th Goddess Girls book finally gives Artemis her third focus book. Her last was #7! 

This one retells the obscure myth of Alpheus the river god and his unwanted pursuit of Arethusa the sea nymph, as well as the variant where Alpheus pursues Artemis herself. I love that they're getting obscure with the myths. 

Artemis is protector of the nymphs, so they come to her for help, though she thinks they could try a little harder to solve their own problems. Arethusa drank from Alpheus's river without permission and he took her special cup, which unbeknownst to him, increases any magical powers the bearer has. To get her cup back, she has to agree to go out with him. She's devastated by this and four other nature nymphs call upon Artemis to help her. 

Artemis has difficulty bargaining with Alpheus though and she gets a bit in over her head with this one. He cheats during a contest and then she's the one who's supposed to go out with him. She asks why he's so dead set on a date that he's relying on trickery, but he won't tell. With the help of the other GGs and the nymphs, Artemis comes up with a plan, but ends up skirting around it so Arethusa ends up voicing the same idea herself. Alpheus said he liked Artemis so much that he could pick her out of every girl in the world, so they gather fifty nymphs and the four GGs, all dress in nymph chitons, hide their hair under leafy caps, and smear mud all over themselves. Alpheus tries a couple tricky plans, but the girls stop him and he guesses incorrectly, though he ends up choosing a nymph that actually does like him. He's relieved that he's still himself and Artemis learns later that Poseidon decided to trick him. He told Alpheus that Zeus decreed every boy had to get a date before his 13th birthday or he'd turn into slugs. It's pretty stupid and Alpheus seems to clever to fall for it, but he did. 

The B plot is that Artemis and her crush Actaeon have a fight. They make up at the end and it's he who tells her about Poseidon's trick. 

The C plot is the other GGs finally helping Artemis clean her damn room. Considering the clean clothes spell Aphrodite did took literally seconds, GG 'verse Artemis is honestly pretty gross. I'm hoping she sticks to the organizational system her friends helped her with because ew. Artemis deserves better than to be represented as such a dirty being. 

Definitely not my favorite one, but I do appreciate the obscure myth and I liked seeing a lot of older characters like Echo and Minthe. And meeting new nymphs. We meet Syke (fig tree), Karya (nuts), Pitys (pine tree) and Britomartis. Britomartis is interesting because I'd never heard of her and apparently, she was like the Artemis of Crete. In myth, she's also called Dictynna/Diktynne, the goddess of Mount Dicte/Dikte, where Zeus was born. In this book, Britomartis hates her name and wants to be called Dicte. I liked her character because she was a bit on the negative side yet not a bad character. So yeah, all in all, a good addition to the series. Next up is Elpis (hope). 

Goddess Girls 27

I swear, one of my worst reading habits is letting new Goddess Girls books sit for like a year before finally finishing the previous year's one right as the current year's one comes out. Artemis just got a new book that should be arriving later today, so here I am, finally finishing Hecate's today. 

I'm honestly not even done with it yet, but I had thoughts I wanted to get down. 

Hecate is one of my favorites, so the reason I ended up setting this book aside is that the authors turned her into an overly anxious scaredy cat. I think they're going for some sort of portrayal of anxiety, but Hecate is just so powerful to me that it doesn't ring true for a younger version of her. 

Hecate is a witch that attends the Hexwitch School on Earth. She's a mortal. And she's definitely got some description disjoint. According to the text, Hecate has dark eyes while the cover shows her with green. She wears a black chiton. Okay, that matches. Then she wears red and white-striped stockings and boots. Outfit disjoint. I wish Hanson had left her with dark eyes, but I do prefer his more Greek and less modern take on the uniform of Hexwitch. She doesn't need stockings and boots. Oh, and a hat. They wear pointy black hats. In ancient Greece. No. So the authors created a more stereotypical witch look and the artist turned her into something that actually fits with the Goddess Girls world. However, I wish they'd talked about this, because my biggest issue is the hair. Hecate is described as having long black hair that is "messy" because "she rarely combed it." Witches are supposed to have messy hair in this world. It's mentioned twice in the first half of the book. I have a feeling the authors envisioned a gothy, pale, stereotypical witch look and Hanson turned her into a more elegant black witch. The problem is that no one would look at that cute afro on the cover and think it was okay to describe it as long, messy and wild. So you've got to get over the disjoint between the cover art and the text version of Hecate, because they very much do not match. I find it very annoying. 

Anyway, the appearance disjoint and her being scared of everything are what slowed my reading down. She's turning 12 the next day and she hasn't been paired with a broom yet. Most witches her age have flown for a couple years but her anxiety holds her back. A witch's broom is a sentient being that a witch is matched with for life, so there's the matter of finding just the right pairing, but Hecate's fear is really what her problem is. 

She deals with some bullying from bitchy, overly competitive witches that like to see others fail. But Hecate is no real threat because she only does well in one single class. To combat her anxiety, she collects facts and writes them on those small pieces of paper hanging around her neck on the cover. Random facts. Let's call them...trivia. Now this I like. Hecate is known as Trivia or Hecate Trivia due to her connection to crossroads. She's also frequently depicted with three faces/selves all melded together. Turning this trivia into our version of trivia amuses me. 

So Hecate has a lot of anxiety and fights it by collecting trivia. If it was only this and her broom issues, it wouldn't be so annoying. But then...they made her scared of animals. Hecate who is often shown with dogs. And ghosts. A witch scared of creepy things. She's got too much going on and it works against her when it comes to her being a likeable character right away.  

After her flying failure, her class goes to the cemetery at midnight to do some gravestone rubbings. There, she stumbles upon the pet cemetery and meets Melinoe, the other girl on the cover. Melinoe is a daemon, not a goddess, and she desperately wants to be the goddessgirl of ghosts, but after getting a prediction from Cassandra, she knows Hecate will be, not her. So she schemes against Hecate and curses her somehow. The pair work together and invent trivia in the form of a question with three answers to choose from and Melinoe's curse seems to be related to that, though it's not been revealed at the midway point where I am now. Melinoe has a bunch of ghost animals that she helps cross the Styx and of course, Hecate is afraid of them because not only are they ghosts, they're animal ghosts. 

Imagine then how happy she is to wake up the next morning on her birthday and find a ghost cat and dog have accompanied her home and won't leave her alone. She also sees a random bit of glitter on her skin that vanishes, so she thinks she's been cursed by Melinoe, who wasn't 100% nice to her in the cemetery. She goes to a witch teacher for help, but the teacher suggests she visit her grandmother, Ms. Hecate at MOA. 

I forgot to mention that part in chronological order. One of the bullies is making fun of her name in the cemetery and Hecate claims to be named for her grandmother. So everyone jumps to the conclusion that it's Ms. Hecate from MOA. That's how the authors are getting around the fact that they've already got a Hecate character in the series. They're not related. They only share a name. But Hecate doesn't correct her lie and it gets passed around her school. 

Off to MOA with Hecate it is. The trip is amusing because she uses a "whisk her" spell to transport herself but can only travel from crossroads to crossroads. I love that nod to her mythical role. She leaves necklaces with her trivia questions at each crossroads because they entertained some people at the first one. 

Upon arriving at MOA, she winds up in a classroom doorway. The four goddessgirls are there, along with Pandora and Pheme, making a card that will welcome Ms. Hecate back. Yeah, she's not even there after Hecate travelled all that way. Artemis's dogs start playing with Hecate's ghost menagerie, which has grown over the trip. Zeus is well aware that Ms. Hecate has no children so she can't have a grandchild, but the goddessgirls talk him into allowing Hecate to stay overnight.

In the cafeteria, Hecate drinks nectar and her skin begins to shimmer. She's a goddessgirl! The glittery part wasn't the curse from Melinoe. Athena tells how she didn't know she was a goddessgirl until Zeus wrote to her, so this isn't unprecedented in the series. After dinner, she bonds with the other GGs a bit. It was nice to see Pandora included for a while. She gets forgotten a lot, despite being Athena's roommate. She feels especially close to Persephone because she knows Persephone must have a dark side to like Hades and be comfortable in the Underworld. But Persephone has to head home and Hecate will borrow her bed in Aphrodite's room. Aphrodite wants to do a makeover, but Hecate protests that witch hair is supposed to be wild, and she borrows a black nightgown from Aphrodite and the two go to sleep. 

That's where I left off last night, so it's time to finish the book and see what happens. I do like Hecate much better than I did at the beginning. She's become mostly unafraid of the ghost animals and she's more comfortable talking to people than she was before. She spouted out a bunch of thunder and lightning trivia around Zeus, but who wouldn't be nervous around Zeus? And she even says "Sorry. You're a big deal. I'm kind of nervous." I liked that a lot. She's more in command of her anxiety and owns up to it instead of hiding it behind the facts and not explaining it. 

Okay, now I've finished the entire thing. A lot of time is spent in the middle with Hecate being badgered by everyone at MOA to simply sit and make more trivia cards. They all become obsessed with the game to the point of Zeus cancelling classes and no one stopping to eat. 

Demeter comes to the school because Persephone has gone missing. The night before, she took some of Hecate's new trivia cards to the Underworld to play with Hades, so Hecate grudgingly accompanies Demeter to the Underworld to rescue Persephone. Yep, just like in the myth of the abduction of Persephone. Heh. There's even a scene where Hecate carries torches. 

While in the Underworld, Hecate runs into Melinoe, who villain monologues. Her curse was to make the trivia game so engrossing that immortals would stop eating nectar and ambrosia and lose their immortality. And die. Yep, she actually says she wants them to die so she can take Zeus's thunderbolt and rule everyone. 

Hecate tricks her and ends up getting back to MOA to stop her from taking the bolt. She asks her ghost dragon to destroy Melinoe's bespelled charcoal that wrote all the cursed trivia cards. When it's destroyed, the curse is over and the spell on everyone is lifted. Including Zeus, who happens to be right there in the office to stop Melinoe, and Ms. Hecate, who is finally back from wherever she went. The ghost animal problem is finally addressed and Zeus names her goddessgirl of ghosts. Because she finally asked the ghosts if she could help them, they suddenly can talk to her and tell her what their last wishes are before moving on. 

Sadly, Melinoe doesn't get much of a comeuppance. She shows zero remorse, even when Hecate tries to help her, and it takes Zeus's threats to make her act a teeny bit repentant. But she gets a role as Herder of Ghost Animals, which is all she really wanted, some sort of title and power. She has to live in the Underworld, also something she wanted, and will take any ghost animals from Hecate once they've crossed the Styx and gone from ghost to shade. She doesn't get the huge amount of glory she wanted, but she still isn't punished for what I think is one of the worst villain schemes in this entire series.

Hecate is offered a place at MOA and takes it, but still wants to attend Hexwitch. So she spends Mon and Tues at Hexwitch, Wed and Thurs at MOA, and then Fridays she helps the ghost animals with their final wishes and moving on past the Styx. 

She finally passes her flying test and one of the witches on the Broom Zoom team tells her she should try out, which is something she wanted to do. 

All's well that ends well, I guess, even if we have another villain not very well punished for their bad actions. 

One final thing, in the author's note at the end, they say how Hecate is called Trivia in Rome because Romans left small gifts for her at the crossroads, which she was the goddess of. They also exchanged news and bits of information there, so trivia came to mean "random, commonplace facts." However, trivia comes from trivium, which is the word for crossroads. So the explanation is only partial in that it never says trivia comes from the word for crossroads. Because it was the word for crossroads, it came to also mean the bits of info passed on by travellers at said crossroads. It all comes back to the crossroads she is the goddess of. 

This one obviously took a while for me to get into, mostly because I'm just a big Hecate fan and I'm picky about how she's depicted. I liked her character growth. She's not afraid of much by the end. I wish the middle hadn't dragged so much and part of it had been replaced with a couple pages of her helping one of the ghost animals. It's just mentioned off-screen that she helped six of the original nine animals. I think that would have been more interesting than many pages of characters making her write more cards. I also hope they work on communication about appearances better, because again, Cover Hecate and Book Hecate are not the same character. 

Various Middle Grade Graphic Novels

The third Goddess Girls graphic novel came out recently and it was fun but suffered from the same problem as the first two. Namely, some of the character designs just aren't up to par. 

I still don't think Aphrodite would wear a ponytail. 

Makeover Athena was cute.

Hephaestus was really cute. He, Medusa and Pheme have my fave graphic novel looks overall. 

Atalanta was a little too girly for my taste. 

We didn't meet anyone else new. The story goes along with the original book, although they followed it a little TOO closely, because there are multiple mentions of Ares' blond hair and blue eyes...neither of which the graphic novel version has. 

These are cute but could be done a lot better. 

I don't know if I've ever talked about Kayla Miller's Click series here. The stories follow fifth grader Olive on her various trials. Click was about her finding the right act in a variety show. Camp had her meeting new friends at summer camp while dealing with her wet blanket friend Willow's constant clinginess. Act has Olive starting sixth grade and running for student council against two of her friends. Clash deals with cool new girl Natasha and how she randomly hates Olive. And Crunch is about Olive learning not to over-extend herself with too many activities. There's also a spinoff series featuring one of the BFF pairs in the supporting cast.  

This is a fun, light-hearted series that's less heavy-handed than some of the middle grade graphic novels. I love Olive's cool librarian aunt, who clearly has a crush on Olive's female guitar teacher. So cute. 

I've reviewed the first two in the Witches of Brooklyn series here before. I reread the second one before tackling this third one and I think this might be my second fave series after Berrybrook. I LOVE the art. 

It's summer and Effie is off to camp for a month. Witch camp! Apparently, green thumb is a real thing and it's a big deal for witches, so Effie is leaving the city to connect with nature for a month at this camp. She does so on her very first night there, waking up to find ivy entwined in her hair and her palms glowing bright green. This is way more than most witches get and it provokes envy in the cabin mean girl. 

I loved seeing all the different witch kids and their varied powers. That was great. The mean girl and Effie never came to terms with anything, although it was the girl's meanness that actually got Effie out of a tight bind (she accidentally woke a dragon and had to put it back to sleep). And there's a side plot involving that panda. He's the one whose room Effie is actually sleeping in. I forget how he's related to either Selimene or Carlota. But he connects with animals and when he got his heart broken, he turned into a panda and went to live in the Bronx Zoo. A girl came and sketched him one day and then his hands transformed back to human, so he came back home, only to have to go along to camp with Effie and be a counselor. The artist girl actually is one of Effie's counselors so their little sideplot romance is adorable. 

Definitely highly recommend this series. 

Then I tried out a new series called Peapod Farm. Jen (on the left) is dragged from the city to the country after her mom and dad get divorced. Her mom bought a farm to run with her boyfriend. Jen is forced to help and, on the weekends, the boyfriend's daughters come to help, too. 

This one was good but also frustrating. The boyfriend character is an ASSHOLE. He's not full-on abusive but he isn't very nice and he frequently gets away with it. Both Jen's mother and his eldest daughter Andi (on the right) excuse his behavior basically as "He's an asshole but that's just the way he is and we all deal with it." I mean, one of the things was really minor. Jen likes to be called Jen, not Jenny, but he keeps calling her Jenny. This is when the mother should step in and ask him to please call her kid by the name she wants to be called. It's not difficult but it never happened. There is a moment nearer the end where both his daughters side with Jen though and that was good. But Mom needs to grow a hell of a backbone. This is definitely semi-autobiographical, but there's a time when the author needs to realize that replicating reality is less important than good writing, unless you're writing an actual autobiography. Her stepdad never changed and she's choosing to portray that, but she should definitely give her dad character here some comeuppance. Stop showing the mom as weak and unable to stand up for her own child. 

I really enjoyed this other than the bullshit from the boyfriend character. The oldest daughter takes a while to grow on you, but she gets there. The younger daughter is awesome. I loved her. 

This one brings us to the fall. Jen is worried about school. She and Andi are working at the pumpkin farm's haunted hayride because the farmer's market is closed. Andi has a thing for the pumpkin farmer's nephew and Jen begins to feel left out. 

At school, the closest friend she finds is the boy in her class that's younger than everyone else. The class bitch teases them. The other kids seem to be liking her more nearer the end though. 

Jen's big frustration this time is that everywhere she turns there are people in relationships. She gets mad when people assume her male friend has to be a boyfriend, and not one but two people spout bullshit about how men and women can't be friends. I don't believe this is ever corrected by an adult and it needed to be. It's like I really want to fully love this series, but in each volume there's one major incident of bad writing that irritates me.

Everything works out in the end and even the class mean girl comes around. Turns out she's envious of Jen's art skills.  

Goddess Girls Graphic Novels 1 & 2

 

The popular Goddess Girls series is being adapted as graphic novels! The first two released today, just like the first two books released on the same day way back when. 

It's been a long time since I read the book versions but I think these stuck pretty close. Where they veer off wildly is in the art. 

I'm too lazy to take pics of the pages so I'll just be describing. 

The main girls mostly look okay. Athena and Aphrodite change clothes a lot, while Persephone and Artemis tend to be forgotten that way. I do not like Aphrodite's hair though. Would the goddessgirl of beauty really wear a ponytail every day? No. Persephone's is cute short though. 

Athena's childhood friend Pallas got an edgy makeover. Love it, though she looks a bit like a short-haired Eris.

Zeus looks like a cross between his typical GG look and Zeus from Disney's Hercules. He's good. Hermes is very cartoony and a bit goofy-looking. They nailed Ms. Hydra and the teachers. 

Medusa and her sisters are a miss. They're all green-skinned with reddish-blonde hair and look like triplets. They each have a different eye color but that's it. Transformed Medusa looks great though. 

Pandora got turned into a redhead and she wears the most bland outfit. I miss her blonde and blue curls. 

Poseidon is a fish boy that squishes when he walks. It's hard to imagine all the girls crushing on him like this. 

Pheme has spiky orange hair that looks like flames and she almost always looks sassy. She definitely got the best comic treatment. 

Hades is pretty cute but I vastly prefer his book design. I like the dark curls more than the short hair here. 

Demeter is very pretty and has a little crush on Zeus, which is funny because he's actually Persephone's father. Not that any of that is ever mentioned in GG. 

Ares has my most hated design yet. He's this big, stocky, ugly kid with a mohawk. How is that gonna work when Aphrodite ends up liking him? Ares in the books makes sense. He's big and muscular but still cute. This guy just looks like a bully. 

There's a random adult character called Varanus, who looks vaguely like a red-haired Hermes, that acts as a school herald. 

I can't remember which book he was in, but Dionysus has little horns. 

Pheme once again steals the show in her dance outfit near the end. 

Overall, the books are way better, but these were cute and they're a fun addition to the series.

Thunder Girls 4

Man, I took forever to get back to this series. Sorry, Skade. You're still my favorite. 

I reread books 1-3 right before this and man, these can be repetitive. I feel way moreso than Goddess Girls. How many times to we have to mention the Ragnarok button or list off everything Loki did wrong? We can remember what he did wrong because he's literally the source of the problem in every single book. 

Well, maybe not this one. I'm only half done. But I'm willing to bet he does something. 

So! Skade is the goddess of skiing in this series. We open with her doing some dancing for the first time in her history class. Only apparently, she can't dance. She's completely unaware of it and thinks she's doing fine, but she overhears Njord making fun of her and boggles this kick thing all the students were trying to do. Then the teacher takes her aside and accuses her of mocking tradition. She explains that she wasn't doing this on purpose, but he doesn't believe her. 

I'm gonna stop right here and complain. The teacher is completely wrong here AND I find it to be an unrealistic situation. Dancing doesn't come easy to everyone and from Skade's description, this isn't an easy dance. 

Also, Njord is a dick, but the normally bold Skade is too embarrassed to stick up for herself, which reads as both out of character and letting a bully get away with bullying. We've got Loki and Angerboda in this series. Did we need another asshole? No.

The book did win some points though because it's mentioning way more new students than the first three. We got the names of a light elf and a human in the third book, but this time, we've got Ull and Balder. Then three frost giants arrive and they get names and descriptions, so this book is slightly redeeming itself. 

The frost giants invite a team of nine skiers to a weekend competition. Odin is a bit hesitant, but eventually agrees. 

After the last classtime is cancelled, the students hit the snow. Loki causes an accident between Angerboda and Skade, and then the two learn Odin is watching and judging who will be the nine chosen for the team. Angerboda starts being fake nice. Skade worries about the things Odin is looking at: athletics, attitude and academics. Naturally, she's concerned about her lack of dancing ability being a problem. She tells the other girls about it and they try to give her a lesson, but when she's practicing on the way to dinner, she overhears Njord and Loki making fun of her again. 

I swear, if the authors have Skade just suddenly like Njord after he's bullied her like this I will be pissed. At least she's showing signs of liking Balder, who's really nice. 

And look, there are the girls at the table. Romance-obsessed Freya notices Njord looking at Skade and of course HAS to say something about it. She can be even more annoying about this than Aphrodite. Instead of telling exactly what Njord has been saying to her, Skade just says he's been annoying her and teasing her. So OF COURSE Freya writes it off with the typical "boys tease girls they like" bullshit. I hate that. It can confuse younger girls into what like-teasing is and what flat-out bullying is. Stop making excuses for boys and start teaching them to communicate their feelings without being mean. It's not that hard. I don't like that Skade has an understand of Njord's words as mean-spirited but refuses to tell her friends. They already know about her dancing trouble. They'd think Njord was an asshole, too, if she would just take a second to fucking explain it. 

I love Skade, but she deserves way better than this plot. I'm so disappointed. 

So Skade is hoping she can show her teacher dancing improvement the next day, but then Odin comes in and says he's chosen the team members. Skade is named as the alternate to the confusion of the others. I think it's another bit of bullshit that bitchy Angerboda was chosen but Skade wasn't. Odin tells her after that it was her dancing and her attitude because when Angerboda went to hug her on the slopes earlier Skade backed away. Anyone as observant as Odin wouldn't be fooled by Angerboda's fake nice girl show. At least Skade mentions this. Odin gives her a little pep talk about being confident even in the face of scary things.

Balder comes to talk to Skade and she asks why he's been yawning so much. He tells her about nightmares in which giants keep bothering him. She, Thor and some others go with him to tell Odin about it. Odin has the idea to extract a promise from every possible thing that could harm Balder, a promise that they won't hurt him. 

The team travels to Jotunheim and Skade leads the way. Freya had flown all their equipment there in her kittycart. She'd wanted Skade to come with her but Angerboda took over that invitation. Angerboda suggests Skade, the lowly alternate, take all their belongings to the igloo dorm the frost giants have made for the teams. While doing that, Skade encounters the giant Skrymir, who she doesn't like, and sees some terrifying fire giants for the first time. 

After that, Skade gets some skiing in and then there's a surprise girls-only aerial tricks competition that even alternates can participate in. Skade does and wins. She, a Vanir and a human are the three winners who will each pick a male skier to compete with the next day in the same event. 

At dinner, the Asgard team (joined by Loki because of course they are) learns that Balder is protected by a force field, which accidentally begins a food fight. Skade stops the fire giants from being pissed by explaining that good fights are fun, and by doing so, she's as good a friendship ambassador for Odin as are Balder, Freya and Yanis the light elf. 

Freya tells Skade that she learns the aerial girls will pick their male companions blindly. The boys will stand behind a curtain, revealing only their boots. Wanting to pair with Balder, Skade goes to the boys' igloo to try to see what his boots look like. She notices Loki acting suspiciously and the next morning, Balder is suddenly out of the competition. Loki put mistletoe in his boot and somehow also tricked Odin's ravens into not securing their protection promise from mistletoe. Loki knew Balder was allergic to it and with his toe swollen, he's out of commission. Loki wanted into the competition to impress Surt, the lead fire giant with a badass flaming sword. But the others aren't having it and Skade is in all the events now, not just the aerial tricks. 

However before knowing about Balder, Skade did choose her partner by his boots, but didn't realize Balder had loaned his boots to Njord, who'd only worn a new pair that weren't broken in yet. She ends up stuck with Njord, but he apologizes to her not once but twice in the course of the book. They end up making a good team after all.

The first event is an obstacle course. Skade spots Ratatosk there and realize her team has to wear the ugly reindeer antler beanies knitted by Frigg. She talks everyone into putting them on because she knows Ratatosk will mention they weren't wearing them. When she falls on the ski slope, she realizes the beanies are actually spelled to be protective headgear. 

The competition itself is crazy. The frost giant Skrymir used magic to create illusions that mess with everyone except the frost giant skiers. Pissed off, Surt uses his flaming sword to fight them, which sets trees on fire and melts enough snow to create an avalanche...of water. 

Once the reach the end of the ski run, a message acorn tells Skade and Njord that Balder is missing. And he's in Helheim of all places. So off they go down the treacherous Helrun ski run to get to Helheim and rescue Balder. Hel in this series is an older woman/monster who is forced to babysit the spirits of the evil dead. She liked Balder's voice and soothing personality so she gave him nightmares that eventually led him to come to Hel, where she's got him reading stories to the evil dead. Hel makes a deal that she'll free Njord, Balder and Skade from Hel if they can make one thing living and one thing dead cry for him. Skade herself cries and then she gets Njord, god of the sea, to bring salt water from the rock itself, creating a waterfall and pool. Hel is thrilled because the evil dead have a cool place to swim, so she lets them all go. Freya came to pick them up in her kittycart, saying that the rest of the competition was cancelled, but then they all realize a lot of these events are the same as what's been predicted to lead to Ragnarok. So then it's a race back to Jotunheim to stop three roosters, gifts from the fire giants, from crowing. Freya's giant cats scare the roosters and save the world. 

Once everyone is back in Asgard, there's a celebration and Skade finally gets over her fear of dancing. She invents some goofy moves and some ski-based ones that others like. She and Njord are officially okay in my book now, but she also realizes she's not crushing on either him or Balder, though maybe someday she will. Even Angerboda is more helpful and happy. 

The second half of this book really improved upon the first, though the plot is all over the place. I assume the authors knew this was the end of the series. There hasn't been a fifth Thunder Girls and it's been almost two years. I think that's why the Ragnarok plot got shoved in there at the end. The redesign of the death of Balder myth would have been enough on its own otherwise. Not a bad quick ending to the series though. I do still like Skade best, even if elements of this book weren't to my liking. 

LITTLE GODDESS GIRLS 1-5

I have been woefully slow with Goddess Girls and that includes the newer series for much younger readers. 

Little Goddess Girls books are very short. They've got lots of cute illustrations, too, but don't expect your favorite GGs just in younger form. These are basically totally different characters and the story is The Wizard of Oz with a bunch of tweaks. 

Athena, as seen on the cover, is now a modern Earthling. A strange wind takes her to a magical land. She's in Dorothy's role. Medusa, who's a mean girl at Athena's school is also in not-Oz, but she's not Earthling Medusa at all but a completely different girl with snake hair. She's in the Wicked Witch role and wants the magical winged sandals that attached themselves to Athena.

Athena is helped by Hestia, who is now that fairy on the cover. I hate this because Hestia was her own character in the Goddess Girls series and they completely changed her look and turned her into an adult fairy. Just give the fairy a different name. I love Hestia and think she's very underrated so to see her character kind of tossed aside and revamped annoys me. Then there are the little talking owls. And the Toto role is played by Oliver, who's Athena's dog in not-Oz. In the real world, Oliver is her pet character in a game she plays on her tablet. 

The story is incredibly basic, but it's also pretty fun once you get past your expectations. So first rule of Little Goddess Girls: Don't expect anything to be the same as in Goddess Girls. 

We met Persephone at the end of the first book. She's sort of the Scarecrow, I guess. But instead of needing a brain, she's convinced she's bad luck and wants some good luck. 

I love her design for this. The little curly pigtails and flowers and leaves sprouting everywhere are really cute. 

Fun fact: She was originally randomly blonde!

The second book takes Athena, Persephone and Oliver into the Wunderworld. Hades makes a cameo in this one and they meet Aphrodite. 

Aphrodite is sort of in the Tin Man role, but instead of lacking a heart, she's lacking a filter. She just blurts out whatever sassy thing and she's actually my favorite of the four because of that. She's hilarious. But she wants to stop and her wish is for likability.

The third book has the sleep-inducing poppy fields. 

And they meet Artemis. 

Artemis is the closest to an actual Oz character because she's very cowardly. 

The fourth book wraps up the first Oz storyline. They meet Zeus, stop Medusa by turning her to stone, Zeus gets whipped away in a balloon after giving the other girls their gifts, and Hestia the fairy reappears to help Athena get home.

Book 5 picks up with Athena at home on Earth, but asked to come to aid not-Oz. So back she goes and now we're in the Ozma of Oz storyline. 

New characters include Heracles and Circe. Circe, as you can see from the cover, has many faces. This is their version of the Mombi role, only they're trying to make her more helpful. The Nome King is being turned into King Hephaestus, so this ought to be interesting. 

These are cute little books, but a bit weird if you're like me and you've been into the GG-verse for so long. 

GODDESS GIRLS 26

Aha, I did it! I am officially fully caught up with Goddess Girls for the first time in too many years. 

I am so happy to say that Persephone's long-awaited third starring role was amazing. Persephone has been my fave since the beginning and it has been far too long for her to sit on the sidelines. Her first book, the second in the series, came out in April 2010, over TEN years ago. Then while the other 3 first four girls got their second books right away throughout 2011, she was bumped until book 11...all the way in 2013. Athena and Aphrodite both got their third books in 2014, but we all had to wait 6 more years to see Persephone again. I hope Artemis gets her third next year. I hate that they're only doing one book a year now. 

Persephone's newest book is delightful. I loved spending time with her and Hades again. Right away we're introduced to Minthe, the naiad who guards the River Cocytus. The Cocytus is the river of wailing and lamentation, so it's not exactly a happy place. Minthe in the original myth was a nymph of the Cocytus so that's straight out of the myth. In the book, she has a simple crush on Hades, but in the myth, she was his lover before Persephone. 

Persephone's on a bit of an introspective journey, as she struggles with being sassy to bullies and then feeling guilty about it and then with her jealous feelings springing from watching Minthe crush on Hades. The lesson she learns by the end is that sometimes you see only what you're looking for and not what's actually there. 

The students are put together in a class competition and Persephone is on a team with Poseidon, Hades, Antheia (the wreath goddess, Iris's BFF) and Makhai, the slightly less bullying half of Kydoimos and Makhai. She's sad when Poseidon and Hades are pulled from her team, having helped come up with two of the clues. I'm not sure what the point of this was. If you're doing such a big event, you don't plan two of the clues after you've told the class the event is the next day. You approach those students privately and plan ahead of time, then don't put them on a team at all. The boys were allowed to pick their replacements and Poseidon suggested visiting mortals Theseus and Pirithous.

I'm going to pause a minute and talk about these two. There was definitely a missed opportunity here. In the previous book, Clotho takes part in the Goddess Girls version of the Calydonian Boar Hunt. Theseus is on Atalanta's team, too. Pirithous was also there in the myth, so I wish there'd been mention of him at least in the crowd. He could have made a comment about the two centaurs Meleager chose for his team, because mythic Pirithous was the husband at the wedding gone wrong that became the Centauromachy. Then mythic Pirithous and Theseus both find themselves widowed so they decide to carry off daughters of Zeus. Theseus picks Helen, while Pirithous is after Persephone. This is worked into the GG book as him having a crush on Persephone and near the end, he tries to get her to leave the Underworld with him instead of staying with Hades. In the myth, Hades traps them on their seats and they're stuck in the Underworld until Heracles comes to the rescue, but he only saves Theseus. So this book contains both the myths of Minthe and Pirithous and Theseus in the Underworld. 

So back to the competition. Persephone realizes as the day goes by that someone having a crush on you is really annoying, so she realizes Hades may not know what to do about Minthe. She also sees a nicer side of Makhai and then later on, also Kydoimos. These two have been bullies for so long that it's nice to round out their characters a bit. That's the whole learning to not just see what you're expecting part of the book. 

Pirithous is so desperate to win that he hacks the scroll-gadgets (yep, GG has finally come up with a way to have cell phones...sort of) and cheats. Athena being Athena figures things out and her team is the only one to also get to the Underworld, which is the final location. 

Antheia and Persephone have a run in with Minthe and honestly, I don't blame her for being upset, because the two goddesses did really go on about what a horrible place her river is. But she attacked Antheia and Persephone turned her into mint to save Antheia. 

So that happened and she's wondering how to tell Hades when they learn from Makhai that Theseus and Pirithous have, against Hades warning, snuck into the Underworld. This is when they're stuck on the bench of forgetfulness or whatever it was called. Something like that because it was near the Lethe. True to myth, Heracles (from Athena's team) has to come save them, but unlike the myth, he does save both. 

After this is resolved, Hades and Persephone go restore Minthe and Persephone forgives her, now seeing how desperately unhappy the naiad is. She even figures out a new home for her: guarding the fountain at MOA so she won't be so lonely. And her crush on Hades is no longer an issue, because she and Kydoimos take a liking to each other. 

All of this is handled much better in the book. I'm just rambling. I think it's one of the stronger GG books for sure.

GODDESS GIRLS 25

Every year I swear I say the same thing and vow to read my Goddess Girls books faster, but they somehow get lost and lost and lost in my reading piles. They only come out once a year now. Shame on you, self. 

Well, not this time! Yesterday was the release of #26 and I received it in the mail today, so I sat down and read #25 cover to cover without stopping for much. 

#25 features Clotho, the youngest of the Fates. I love Goddess Girls and I do know not to expect accurate Greek myth ever, but the way they did the Fates was kind of odd. The three Fates are Clotho who spins the thread, Lachesis who measures it, and Atropos who cuts it. You'd think they'd be born in the order of their roles, but this book has Atropos as the eldest at 13, Lachesis is 12 and Clotho is 11. So what exactly did the older ones do until Clotho was born? Considering their important role to mankind, they'd have to predate the birth of man. You'd think. Man couldn't be running around without the Fates at work. Anyway. I need to not think about it too much. 

So Clotho is the Asian-looking Fate, Lachesis is black and Atropos is the redhead. The image on the book's spine is always of its main character. Yet the image on Clotho's spine...is Lachesis. Odd. 

Plot-wise, it's your typical rebellious youngest sister tired of being bossed around by the two older ones. Thankfully, most of the book is Clotho on her own. Zeus has rules for them and she's breaking #3, which says not to hang out with mortals, by going to the Immortal Marketplace for the first time. 

The book neatly reintroduces all the main characters from the series through Clotho's eyes. She meets most of them at the grand opening of Game On! a new IM store. 

The story blends the myths of the Calydonian Boar Hunt and Tantalus while also looking back at Arachne and giving her story a happy ending. Not the most deserved happy ending. She's still mostly bitchy, but she's getting better.  

I liked Clotho a lot and the book was fast-paced. Most of it takes place in a single day. There was one major plothole. Each Fate takes her turn picking where they do their nightly work of deciding the fates of men. It was about to be Clotho's turn, but Atropos ends up going twice. It's not on plot purpose, just a legit proof-reading error and minor nitpicking on my part. I like to mention these things in case anyone else goes "Huh? I thought she had her turn last night" and pages back to that part like I did. 

Naturally, there's a happy ending and I really enjoyed this one. It was a lot of fun. What's different about right now is that I'm about to crack open #26 and I will likely have it finished later tonight. Then I'm going to read the Little Goddess Girls books, too! And then finally get to Skade's Thunder Girls book because I keep forgetting I never did! And I love Skade, so it makes no sense. 

GODDESS GIRLS 24

It's been almost two years since my last brand new Goddess Girls review!

I'm such a slacker.

Eos's book released in December 2018 and I am finally tackling it now. It's been fun rereading the entire series! But it's time to do the two most recent books and then we wait until December for a brand new Persephone story! (It's seriously about time.)

Eos's book has...a lot. There is a lot going on here. Wow.

We met Eos briefly in Nyx's book. The two girls pass each other as Nyx's work night comes to an end and Eos's begins. However, unlike Nyx, Eos only works for about half an hour, producing the dawn colors until her older brother Helios brings the day. Eos also has an older sister named Selene, goddess of the moon.

Eos lives with her mother, Theia, who is a Titaness. She's described in the book as the "goddess of shiny things," but it's really more like the goddess of shining and brightness. She does give precious metals their shine, so Theia being into jewelry in the book makes sense. Eos chooses to go to a mortal school because she holds a grudge against Zeus and wants to be nowhere near him. You see, Eos's father is Hyperion, one of the Titans who fought against Zeus in the Titanomachy. Hyperion is being held in Tartarus as punishment and Eos is mad at him for promising to come home and not being able to and at Zeus for putting him there.

So Eos's daily life consists of getting up early, bringing the dawn for half an hour, then going home to prepare for her school day. She can turn herself into vapor and shrink herself, so her bedroom is actually the inside of a large urn.

Eos's school life is complicated. She's the only immortal, so many of the students are in awe of her. She also talks about how she's interested by so many things that she's constantly obsessing about a new interest and then setting it aside for the next one. So she runs many school clubs and participates in a lot of activities. She and her mother both like to keep themselves busy, likely as a coping mechanism.

During a scrollbook club meeting, Eos is insulted by a rather stupid mortal named Zoe. Eos flies threateningly over her before reigning in her anger and regaining composure. She thinks back to an incident in second grade when a girl named Nefili insulted Hyperion, and Eos yanked her into the air and threatened to drop her. (I can find no reference for this incident. The only Nephele is a cloud nymph that has nothing to do with Eos.) But since then, Eos has vowed not to unveil her powers or wings at school. The mortal girls in this club are another example of characters being negative and not getting any comeuppance. Why be in a book club if you're not going to read the book? Eos has a right to say what she did and the girls were stupid for crossing her and insulting her, goddess or not. The only further mention of them is Eos later on thinking that she'll let one of them run the club and suffer the annoyance of no one doing the reading.

So let's pause a moment and review. We've got Eos struggling with negative feelings relating to her father's imprisonment and we've got her struggling with not fitting in at school due to her immortal status.

Now we can introduce another major character. Eos's best friend is a mortal boy named Tithonus, who is obsessed with bugs. Eos's third struggle is that she knows Tithonus will only be with her for a relatively short time, so she wishes he was immortal, too.

Those are all the things weighing on her mind. Now we get to the actual plot. Nyx tossed Eos a notescroll and invited her to Ephesus to watch the unveiling of Nyx's statue at Artemis's temple. Eos accepts the invitation and for the first time, goes to be around multiple other immortals. She gets Ares' autograph for Tithonus and tries to pin down Apollo, because she thinks he can help her make Tithonus immortal. She ends up being invited to stay at MOA for the night, using Aphrodite's room because she and Persephone are sleeping at Demeter's.

Eos enjoys her time with the immortals and does get Apollo to do a prophecy for her, saying that Zeus will grant Tithonus immortality. She goes to see Zeus and uses the prophecy itself to get him to agree to help. It's an interesting twist. She made Apollo give her a prophecy, which went in her favor, and then because of that prophecy, Zeus granted her request. So Apollo foresaw Zeus granting her request, but he only did so because Apollo foresaw it. It's twisty kinda like time travel. However, due to the wording of everything, it's Eos that has to grant Tithonus immortality. Zeus gives her the ability to do so, which expires in 24 hours, but he doesn't tell her how to do it!

Are you ready for another crazy plot? Yeah, we're not done yet.

So earlier when Eos asked for Ares' autograph, she thought she saw Aphrodite frowning at them. Naturally then, it's Ares who comes to Eos for help, catching her on her way back from Zeus's office. He takes her to the boys' dorm, which is seen by Pheme, because...get this...there's a spider in his room and he heard she's got bug knowledge thanks to her friend Tithonus. Ares is afraid of spiders. Yep. Eos helps him out and sets the tiny spider outside, but along comes Aphrodite and that's where the real trouble starts.

Because, you see, after 24 previous books of having a crush on Ares and not one word of this being mentioned to my memory, Aphrodite suddenly has a jealous streak. Eos mentions that she has a reputation for jealousy, but she's never really been jealous or envious before. Aphrodite summons a bedbug to bite Eos while she sleeps in her room, but she also casts a spell on her, which will cause her to fall in love with three "bugs." It's by far the worst thing any of the main four goddesses have ever done. I'm not sure why the authors decided to make Aphrodite look so bad when they can't even be bothered to punish the random characters who act poorly throughout the series. It's an odd choice for sure.

Granted, it comes directly from myth. Eos slept with Ares in Greek myth, which caused jealous Aphrodite to curse her with insatiable desire. She abducts several males, including Orion, Tithonus, Cephalus and Cleitus. All four of these are mentioned in this book. Eos shows no interest in Orion, but Tithonus is obviously her best friend, and Cephalus and Cleitus are his friends from school.

It works with the myth, but it's still odd to have Aphrodite behave so poorly.

Eos has no idea she's been spelled and goes to the Supernatural Market with some of the other girls. On the way back to MOA, she spies two little black beetles, which she suddenly feels the urge to keep as pets. Athena helps her find a jar for them so she can take them home. Eos names the beetles...Cephalus and Cleitus after the boys from school, who have black hair and wear shiny black tunics all the time. So in a way, she does abduct them.

Upon arriving home, Eos talks with her mom and the subject of Hyperion comes up. Eos had been started when Zeus mentioned him during their meetings, saying he went to the Underworld to play chess with him. Theia also visits him there and invites Eos along with her, telling her where a shortcut is.

Eos goes to see Tithonus next, because she was going to help him with a science fair project. She tries out her immortality spell on him, but it conflicts with Aphrodite's spell and turns Tithonus into a grasshopper, which Eos falls in love with, making him the third "love bug" from the spell. She's able to capture him and get him into a terrarium that he'd been making for his own pet grasshopper. She then takes him into her bedroom urn. While she's there, she gets a notescroll from Aphrodite. Ares came clean...sort of...about what happened and Aphrodite admits to the spells she cast. So she redeems herself a tiny bit, but it doesn't lessen the shock over her behavior for me. Not a bit.

Knowing Eos's immortality spell and Aphrodite's love bug spell conflicted, Eos now knows why Tithonus is now an immortal grasshopper. She doesn't know what to do, but then she remembers her dad won an award for spell-casting and it's off to the Underworld! Taking her mom's shortcut, Eos makes her way to Hyperion's rather nice home in Tartarus. They have an awkward but ultimately promising reunion and thanks to knowing the exact wording of both spells, Hyperion is able to tell Eos what to say to right things. Tithonus will go back to boy form, but also back to being mortal. He never wanted immortality in the first place, so everything works out.

Returning home, Eos is able to change Tithonus back to boy shape just in time, as his mother is there looking for him. He's thrilled about his experience and uses it to make their science project even better. He also retained the ability to distance jump, so he finally can be good at a sport like he always wanted. Eos has to promise not to cast more spells, but she also embraces her goddessgirl differences and decides to be herself more at school. She's visiting her father now and has found that chess helps focus her restless mind, so she's both playing with him in person and via distance. All of her problems are now resolved.

Whew! This book really was quite an unexpected ride. Eos's feelings about her father are some of the most serious and complicated in the entire series, and that's just the tip of the iceberg with this one.

The actual myth of Eos and Tithonus has her asking for him to be immortal, but she forgets to ask for eternal youth, so he's condemned to age forever. She turns him into a cicada out of pity. I think they worked that angle in there pretty well! It's really only Aphrodite's behavior that's strange for this book. If they'd hinted at it throughout the series, it would be one thing, but Aphrodite is always one of the most generous characters.

Up next: Clotho the Fate!

REREAD REVIEW: Goddess Girls 6

I love the German titles. "School Trip with Mummies." Ha.

This might be my final reread review. I'm not sure yet. I wanted to do this one, because this is the last random international cover I was able to find.

I covered a lot in my original review of this book and I stick with my headcanon for the Isis/Hathor issue. I still think they swapped places.

A few things have jumped out at me on this reread that I didn't nitpick about before and my Classicist/Egyptologist self needs to note them this time.

A time period for this series is basically impossible to establish. The Trojan War has just taken place. So that's possibly around the 12th Century BCE. In this book, Aphrodite mentions the statue of Zeus at Olympia, which was recently finished. That was around 435 BCE. She also mentions the Seven Wonders of the World, which weren't even starting to be mentioned until the 2nd or 1st Century BCE. So yeah, time is impossible to establish, because there is no single time frame for this series. It just melds everything.

However, I still raised my eyebrows at the declaration of Cairo as Egypt's capital. Cairo wasn't even founded until 969 CE. (Or 969 AD if you use the BC/AD system.)

Athena says "hieroglyphics." Sigh.

Athena hands out translation rings that she had Hephaestus make. They'll help "decode Arabic languages." The correct term for that should be Semitic languages. And what the ancient Egyptians spoke was certainly not one of them! Both the ancient Egyptian languages and the Semitic languages fall under the larger heading of Afro-Asiatic languages. So yeah, what was spoken in ancient Egypt is very different from Arabic.

I finished rereading this one a few days ago, but was too busy to get to finish writing this. I didn't notice any other nitpicks aside from the ones I mentioned above. I do still enjoy the book, but I wish the Egyptian side of things had been handled better.

I've also finished rereading 7 and 8 and I have no further comments on those, so this may indeed be my last one of these, as I just reread the remaining books without reviews. Until I get to Eos and Clotho that is! Those are the two newest ones that I haven't read yet.

REREAD REVIEW: Goddess Girls 5

This German cover shows the title "Homework for a Hero," which sums up the action of this book better than the original title of "Athena the Wise." But all the GG titles are that name-"the"-adjective format.

Athena's tasked by her dad to help Heracles, a new student at MOA, with his twelve labors. Turns out the labors were arranged by Zeus because he wanted some inspiration for decoration on his newest temple.

Athena's kind of all over the place in this book. She helps Heracles with some labors, but then takes a break to catch up on her homework and prepare for her weaving contest with rude mortal Arachne. I would have preferred it if she'd been able to help Heracles with more labors, because she really only goes along for Artemis's deer, the hydra, the boar and the stables, then helps with Cerberus and the final labor. Heracles does the lion, birds, bull, horses, cattle and apples by himself. I would have liked to have seen how Atlas ended up holding the sky, when he was actually a MOA student that went along with Heracles, instead of standing there holding up the sky the entire time. 

The ninth labor is the one they tweaked for the story. In the myth, it's getting the girdle of Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons. Athena could totally have helped with that and we could have met the Amazons. But instead they changed it to "win the favor of a strong girl." Heracles' strong girl is Athena, so they turned it into that to pair the two up. They're an odd couple, but they kinda work for the series. Not my fave couple, but far from the worst one, too.

Far more interesting to me is the small sideplot of Arachne. She's a total bitch to Athena, who gets angry and agrees to the weaving contest, then worries about it for several chapters, fearing she's overreacted. During the contest, Arachne picks an incredibly insulting theme for her weaving, which Athena destroys before turning Arachne into a spider. Then she worries again that she overreacted, which is annoying. Arachne deserved it. Like a lot. It raises an interesting question though, because Athena consults her Revenge-ology scroll on what to do and there's a chapter dealing with disrespect from mortals. Now does this apply to all mortals? Because Medusa is said to ace Revenge-ology every year, yet that doesn't stop her from being bitchy to immortals. Hmm! Ah, we'll see more of her in a few more books.

I've got one last international cover to share, another German one, so I'll be back with one more of these reread reviews. Then we'll see where I go from there. If I have additional comments on the books, I'll post more, but I know I wrote longer reviews the more I did them, so I may not have anything to add.

REREAD REVIEW: Goddess Girls 4

UK cover

Here's the meat of my original review:

"Artemis the Brave is #4 and the first of the longer books, though still shorter than the subsequent offerings. She spends the story dealing with her first crush. I'm not a big fan of "the tomboy gets a crush for the first time and bumbles through it" stories. Especially when said crush is very obviously a complete ass like Orion is. Everyone knows it except Artemis. Everyone tells her so, but she has to learn the hard way. Artemis is my least favorite of the four main girls. She's a slob and as a dog owner, I have to say she lets her dogs run around way too out of control. I'm also rarely interested in the athletic characters. Not my cup of nectar."

My thoughts on this still stand. I don't like that Artemis lets her dogs just be completely out of control and a nuisance to everyone. She's at a school. It's okay to leave them behind sometimes. They'd be perfectly fine in her room during the short school hours. (They only have four classes, after all.)

German cover

What I do like is all the jokes involving Orion. They must have decided that since he's one of the most famous constellations, that they'd turn him into a star somehow. The names of the theater award stars he wears on his belt are the names of the actual stars in his constellation.

This does make the second book in a row with one of the main girls crushing on a guy that's an ass. That's a bit of a tiresome theme, so I'm hoping Athena has better luck in the next book, which introduces Heracles. I can't remember how he acted in the book, but he has been her long-standing crush for the rest of the series.

Speaking of introductions, we did meet Actaeon briefly at the end of this book. He'll reappear in the future.

REREAD REVIEW: Goddess Girls 3

UK cover

Here's what I had to say the first time:

"The third book features Aphrodite having some love problems. A lot of the boys like her, obviously, but she likes Ares most, though she can't really figure out why, because he's kind of a bully. She gives Athena a makeover and Ares pays a ton of attention to her, so Aphrodite gets jealous. She's also dealing with the affections of Hephaestus, who she only likes as a friend. And to top it off, a mortal comes to her for some love advice. So she spends the book trying to help the mortal, trying to figure out how to tell Hephaestus they should just be friends, and patching up her friendship with Athena. Aphrodite realizes that Ares is pretty much an ass by the end of the book, but he, like Medusa, is one of those characters that ends up redeemed(ish) later on. Aphrodite is a fun character because she's an interesting mix of typical beauty and OCD. She likes everything in her room just so, and that's one of the reasons she's so focused on her appearance, too."

German cover

Honestly, I don't have too much to add to that, but I'm committed to doing posts for all these books that I have cool international covers to show off.

You wouldn't think I'd like a book on Aphrodite so much. It really is a mystery why she ever liked Ares, because early Ares is a dick. He's just a bully and even goes around with two other bullies to back him up. Kydoimos we met last time, but now Makhai is introduced as well. The Makhai in myth were actually plural. They're battle demons, children of Eris. Kydoimos is likely a Makhai himself. I wish they'd used Alala (war cry), too, but I guess the gorgons are enough female bullies.

Sadly, the last of the cute Indonesian covers.

I don't think there are any other new named male characters. We do get one new female: Aglaia. In myth, Aglaia is one of the three Graces and wife to Hephaestus. So it makes sense that she appears at the end of the book as a new love interest for Hephaestus.

I really like Hephaestus in this series. He's one of the only...if not actually the only...depictions of the god that isn't like some buff dwarf from a role-playing game. He's a scrawny little thing instead. And one of the sweetest, most thoughtful and caring boys in the series.

REREAD REVIEW: Goddess Girls 2

UK cover

My original review for this book was:

"The second book focuses on Persephone, who has two big problems. First, her mother always told her to "go along to get along," so she gets roped into doing things she doesn't want to because she can't say no. Second, Demeter is extremely overprotective. She meets Hades early on and likes him a lot, but struggles when both her mother and her friends disapprove. He's got a bit of a bad rep in school, which Persephone eventually gets to the bottom of. She spends the book finding herself and realizes she's a cute balance of light and dark things, as she should be. Hades and Persephone are the only couple I really "'ship" from this series. They're adorable. I really love Persephone. She's my favorite of the main four, though unfortunately, she's the most underused. She doesn't even get a second book until #11."

German cover

Those comments still stand. I like this book a lot, although it doesn't make the other Goddess Girls look very good. They're so quick to jump to conclusions and rumors about Hades that they give him zero chance, which may not be the best look for three of your four series heroines.

Persephone takes the stage and you don't see much of the others. The book opens with a scene at the Immortal Marketplace, which Persephone didn't want to visit, where she buys makeup and yarn she doesn't want, all because her mother told her to "go along to get along," which Persephone takes as meaning to do what others want with no regard to your own feelings.

Adorable Indonesian cover!

I like Persephone's journey in learning more about herself. She likes darker things that others don't. She's interested in death, cemeteries and the Underworld, where the other MOA students are so afraid of it that they never give Hades a chance. Kinda makes no sense, considering most of them are immortal. How is death a scary thing when it doesn't apply to you?

We do meet some more new characters in this book. The four Goddess Girls are there, as well as Pheme and Pandora, but we also meet more of the boys. Aside from Hades, Ares has the biggest scene. Poseidon and Dionysus are mentioned again. Atlas is introduced with an amusing "Atlas shrugged" line. And Artemis' twin Apollo gets a mention. Thanatos and Hypnos are winged men who work in the Underworld, and of course there's also Charon. The most unknown of the new additions is Ares' friend Kydoimos. It's not clarified who he is, but in myth, he's the personification of battlefield confusion.

My real wish for this one is that it had been longer! The myth of Hades abducting Persephone is a pretty big one. I liked how they made it her choice to run away and he returned her, but I wish we could have spent more time with these characters. Even after all this time, Persephone and Hades are the only couple I really ship for this series.

REREAD REVIEW: Goddess Girls 1

UK cover

I decided to reread the entire Goddess Girls series. Thunder Girls gave me the mythology itch and instead of just reading the two GGs that I was behind on, I decided "Let's redo them all!" There are several where I can't remember what happened, so it seemed like a good idea.

I looked back on my original review for Athena the Brain and was disappointed to see I'd written so little on it. I don't plan on doing these secondary reviews for all the books, but only as necessary.

As always, I need to mention the First Rule of Goddess Girls: DO NOT EXPECT ACCURATE GREEK MYTHOLOGY.

Instead of rehashing the American covers, I thought it would be fun to sprinkle in some of the international versions. Sadly, there aren't many! But what there is are pretty cool.

Hebrew language edition

Athena the Brain is less a solid story on its own and more of a world-building exercise. You meet all the main characters. Athena, Persephone, Aphrodite and Artemis are the four main Goddess Girls. Medusa is set up as the antagonist. Poseidon is there on the boy end of things. Dionysus gets a brief mention, but I don't recall any other boys. You meet Principal Zeus, some of the staff and a couple teachers. You see how the school functions. That's the meat of the story.

Little mythology Easter Eggs are scattered through. The biggest one is that Athena's best friend is named Pallas. Pallas was a daughter of Triton. The girls were raised together (as in the book, though there's no mention of Triton) and Athena accidentally killed Pallas in an athletic competition (thanks to Zeus's intervention). Hence her being called Pallas Athena sometimes. 

German cover

Also amusing is that Athena still is the one who transforms Medusa and gives her her stone powers. All three Gorgon sisters attend the school, but only Stheno and Euryale are immortal. Medusa's mortal. All three have green skin and hair so dark green that it's almost black. Medusa steals an invention of Athena's that should have been called Snarkypoo. It's shampoo that stops bullying. But Athena accidentally spelled it Snakeypoo and...yep, Medusa's hair turned to snakes and she got her stone powers. 

There's one reason I wanted to write this review. I was annoyed at past me for not going into detail on this, but the book's main flaw for me is the handling of the Trojan War. The characters in Hero-ology class are each given a figure representing a human. Then they manipulate their humans, each guiding them in certain ways. After a short time, the Trojan War happens. However, it occurs in the span of two days.

Indonesian cover (I love this one!)

Rather famously, the Trojan War last TEN YEARS. And there's not some sort of wonky time thing going on. It isn't magically ten years passing on Earth while it's two days on Olympus. Because not long after this, Athena wins the invention competition and one of her rewards is her friend Pallas coming for a visit. Pallas, who is definitely not suddenly ten years older.

I don't mind a lot of the changes they make to the original myths, but turning the Trojan War into a class exercise and shrinking it down to only two days is not exactly one of my favorite choices that they made. I can't remember off the top of my head if Cassandra says anything about the length of the war in her book. I'll have to remember to keep an eye out for it once I make it that far. 

So yeah, there you have it. Some new comments on an old fave. I really do love this series, so I'm looking forward to a refresher on all of them.