This is the first book in the Goddess Girls series. The authors put a fun twist on Greek mythology by making the goddesses interact in a middle school setting. The first four books highlight Athena, Persephone, Aphrodite and Artemis as individual characters. As the series continues, we see more group interaction as they go through lots of different adventures and learning moments together. This environment makes it a lot more relatable for middle school girls that are reading these books as it reflects a lot of what the reader may be experiencing being in the same age group as the goddess girls. 

The first book in this series has to do with Athena; this is where we get introduced to the school and the rest of the girls. One day she gets a message from almighty Zeus himself saying that Athena is in fact a goddess. From here she is summoned to go to Mount Olympus Academy. She is very excited by this opportunity as she feels that she will finally be able to fit in somewhere. Once she arrives, she realizes that school is not all that different from school back on earth—there is even a mean girl of the school, Medusa. From the beginning Medusa and Athena don’t get along because Poseidon starts paying attention to Athena, which makes Medusa jealous. Myth fans might be surprised by the romantic drama that is present in this story, but it does make it that much more relatable to the middle school reader.

I would definitely recommend this book to both girls and boys; t for the middle school age group, this is a good book for anyone from any background to read. You don’t need to know a lot of mythology to read this book either; the authors do a great job of making the information very easy to follow and enjoy. I remember back in middle school when this series first came out, my girls and I were so excited to read them. We fell in love with them because we felt like we were able to relate to each one of the goddesses, since each goddess had her own book that highlighted her. In the first book the reader is introduced to all of them but as you go through the series you get to see each one of the girls in her own environment. Each one of my friends and I were able to connect to one of the goddesses. 

Overall, this is definitely one of my favorite books from my childhood and I am so glad that I was able to grow up reading. It was one of the first series that I recommended to my little sister once she became a little older and started reading more books and she ended up loving them just as much as I did when I was her age. Reading them again at the age of 22 is so nostalgic and just as fun as it once was, so even though I say that I would recommend them to the middle school age child, I think it’s also a sweet little series for someone my age to read as well. – Vidya Devarajulu

* For further information on the Our Mythical Childhood Survey, please refer to the website of the project “Our Mythical Childhood” [link: http://omc.obta.al.uw.edu.pl/], led by Prof. Katarzyna Marciniak at the Faculty of “Artes Liberales,” University of Warsaw, Poland, with the participation of Bar Ilan University, University of New England, University of Roehampton, University of Yaoundé 1, and other affiliated scholars, within the funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (grant agreement No 681202).