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.