With yesterday's release of Thunder Girls #1, I decided to get Medea out of the way first, then reward myself by reading Thunder Girls.
Medea is a student at Enchantment Academy, a school for mortals studying sorcery. She has a wand, which thankfully disappears for most of the story, since it's too much Harry Potter and far too little Greek myth. The red chiton she wears on the cover is actually the school uniform, which is pretty cool.
Medea overhears her aunt Circe telling her overprotective father that there's a prophecy about someone stealing his golden fleece and Medea's heart before dethroning him. Circe whisks Medea off to Mount Olympus Academy with her, because she thinks she's taking her out of harm's way. Circe is guest-teaching Hero-ology class for the week.
Medea's excited for the adventure, but unfortunately, the other student taken along is her frenemy Glauce. Now in the myths, Glauce is betrothed to Jason, even though he's already married to Medea, so Medea takes her revenge. Glauce is an innocent character. In this book, Glauce's a controlling bitch who constantly puts down Medea and takes credit for her ideas. The annoying thing is that Medea sees this, but both won't do anything about it and won't stop being "friends" with Glauce. I think this is one of those issues with reading books that I'm far older than the target market for. As a kid, this type of situation makes more sense and the book shows Medea finally getting away from the toxic friendship, but as an adult, I have zero patience for people like this and it's not fun to read Medea dealing with it for so long.
So in class, new heroes are distributed and each class has one adventure to guide. The first class, which contains Athena, Aphrodite, Poseidon, Medusa and others, is doing Jason and the Argonauts. Two main misadventures happen. The first is that Eros and Aphrodite are messing around with tiny love arrows and Heracles gets stuck with one so he falls in love with the special shield he's given for the adventure, as he's one of the people going along on it. The shield's name? Hylas. Yep, they took the boy Heracles loved and turned him into a shield. I'll be glad when homosexuality isn't so often avoided in children's books. Sigh. The second thing is that Medea and Glauce get transported to the Argo along with Heracles, which no one knows, because Circe thought she sent them back to Enchantment Academy at the same time as the accidental transportation.
Medea and Glauce are stuck along for the ride with the Argonauts and it's pretty fun. I always love Atalanta, although she's a bit of an oddball in this book. Jason himself is okay and Glauce develops a crush on him. Medea plots to work against Jason to protect her father's throne, but she stupidly took the tiny arrow that hit Heracles and stuck it in her pocket. Yeah, she gets pricked by it and then acts stupid for several chapters, crushing on Jason against her will. She even knows it's against her will, but can't stop herself from acting that way. Thankfully, this happens later on in the book, so it's not the entire time, but I hate love spells, so it was another thing I got impatient with.
The Hylas incident does happen. The nymphs grab the shield instead of a boy and make off with it, so Heracles leaves the mission to try to find it.
Medea ends up proving herself in the end, Circe removes her crush spell so she's normal again, and her father realizes she's mature enough to board at the school, which is what she wanted. She also wins a spot on the school's special Magicasters team and Glauce does not.
One of the odd things about the book is that Medea, as the granddaughter of Helios, is given a powerful sun stare. If she gets angry, she can give people a sunburn or set things on fire. It's really only there as something Glauce uses against her and to help her wow the judges during the Magicasters tryouts, so it's kind of a strange power to give a mortal for no real reason.
I liked Medea as a character, aside from her not being able to stand up for herself. Glauce, on the other hand, sucked. While she did eventually lose control over Medea and her embellishments on the story of the Argonauts would be outed by Pheme's factual articles, she still ended up with Jason, who actually liked her back for some unknown reason. She was the nasty sort of character that you don't want anything good for.
In all, there are a lot of good story elements here and it's a nice adventure. It's really just tainted by Medea's lack of ability to stand up for herself and the whole love magic crap.
Medea's book came out in December and it's until December that we wait for the next installment, Eos the Lighthearted. Holub and Williams are busy with their new Norse-based Thunder Girls series and the first two installments of that are taking the place of new Goddess Girls books. The first Thunder Girls book, Freya and the Magic Jewel, released yesterday and I plan to read it today. The second, Sif and the Dwarfs' Treasures, comes out in October. The other two Thunder Girls are Idun and Skade so there are your stars of books 3 and 4. No word who will be the star of Goddess Girls 25, but I would think we'd at least find out in December, when Eos' book comes out.
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