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.