The Goddess Girls Series

It’s a fun idea, morphing Greek gods into a series for kids but I struggle with some of the cliche late teen attitudes. It feels like they tried too hard to appeal to the tweens by having standard tropes of things like homework is to be avoided at all costs, looks are important, and the athletic bad boy (Ares) literally makes the girls squeal in delight. This last one is the biggest problem for me. If it’s a book with a target audience of 8-9 year olds and they add a sexual attraction element… it’s just weird for me to shoehorn sexuality into kids stuff. There are attempts to criticize the value of vanity (everyone hints that Aphrodite is too into her looks) but it’s not very strong and may fly over young heads, giving the opposite message. As far as the quality of the story I found myself hoping to reach the end of the chapter for the night. It was fun to see Greek characters and monsters remixed but there’s nothing new or exciting here story-wise and it’s certainly not complex enough to keep kids older than twelve interested.

I’ve always loved these books and own like all of them even though I’m way too old for them by now, and while they’re kinda cliche and dumb fluffy stuff at times, they really stick to actual Greek mythology plots, and have good role model characters. Although I have to say, every girl that each book features ends up crushing on a guy. In every. Single. Book. How bout some LGBTA+ characters, amiright? These books have got the making ancient myths into a modern-day scenario thing going on pretty good, but what is unrealistic is the lack of queer characters. How bout some asexual main characters that don’t end up liking a guy at the end of every book. Or lesbian relationships would be great too, I mean come on. They really need to keep up the modern thing in ALL aspects. I will say however that there have been 24 books averaging about 230 pages each, published in the span of 8 years, and that is seriously impressive.