There’s something so enthralling about Greek mythology. The gods and the legends seem powerful and magnificent whatever age you are, and that’s one of the great things about these stories.
So if your little one has been learning all about Zeus at school and wants a bit more, these are the children’s Greek mythology books I’d pick, sorted by age. Classic Myths to Read Aloud, Hour of the Olympics, Who Let the Gods Out, Percy Jackson and the Greek Gods, and one from Korea, The Last Fallen Star.
Two of the five retell the myths themselves. The rest are stories where the gods crash into somebody’s life, and a lot of the jokes come from that.
The old myths are full of swallowed babies and boys falling out of the sky, so each pick says how much of that it keeps. Two of the five are on our books for 9 year olds shelf, and the list runs younger and older from there.
Greek mythology books for 5 to 7 year olds
Classic Myths to Read Aloud by William F. Russell
Classic Myths to Read Aloud
It’s a collection of myths from ancient Greece and Rome. Athena and Poseidon argue over who gets a brand-new city. He makes a warhorse leap out of the ground and she grows an olive tree.
It’s written for a grown-up to read out loud. Every myth has a short note to set the scene, a rough reading time and a guide to saying the names. Zeus is ZOOSE. The stories start simple and get harder as the book goes on, and the first set is marked for five and up.
The retellings are old-fashioned, with long sentences, and plenty of them end sadly. Icarus drowns, and the book itself says these don’t make good bedtime stories.
Hour of the Olympics by Mary Pope Osborne
Hour of the Olympics
Jack and Annie land in an olive grove outside Olympia on the opening day, with 40,000 people there for the festival. Then Annie notices there are no girls anywhere. Plato himself takes them to the poet they’ve come to find.
She’s a young woman who taught herself to read and write, because girls weren’t sent to school. Girls aren’t allowed at the Olympics either, and Annie tells Plato exactly what she thinks of that.
It’s book 16 of Magic Tree House, but the first page catches a new reader up. Later on, guards take hold of Annie and the crowd shouts for her arrest. That’s frightening for a page or two, and nobody gets hurt.
For a 7 year old who wants the gods in a much sillier mood, there’s Athena & the Magic Land, the first Little Goddess Girls book. Athena is eight and gets swept off her feet by a sparkly purple storm. A pair of golden winged sandals flies onto her feet and won’t come off.
Medusa from school is there too, except her braids are now hissing green snakes, and she wants those sandals. We have ten Little Goddess Girls books.
Greek mythology books for 8 and 9 year olds
Who Let the Gods Out by Maz Evans
Who Let the Gods Out
Elliot Hooper is twelve and very, very tired. His mum has started forgetting things, small ones at first and then big ones, like wandering into the fields after dark. He does the shopping, the cooking and all the worrying, and he hasn’t told a soul.
On top of that, a letter says the family farm near Stonehenge will be taken in a week unless someone finds twenty thousand pounds.
Then a clump of stars drops out of the night sky and lands in the cow dung. It’s Virgo, from the Zodiac Council, and she politely asks the cow for directions. Before long she and Elliot have set loose Thanatos, the Daemon of Death, and the help that turns up is Zeus, rounder than his statues, with Pegasus.
Elliot’s nan and grandad both died in the last year, and he’s so short of money that he takes some from a neighbour’s handbag. The worry about his mum runs right through it, next to the jokes.
There are four Elliot books and they go in order. In Simply the Quest, Virgo has to prove she’s a hero, and her first quest arrives by text from Hermes. He wants loo roll.
In Beyond the Odyssey, the school welfare team visits a house where Virgo has secretly adopted a baby gorgon called Gorgy, who only says “plop”. Against All Gods is the last one and needs the other three first. It goes down into Tartarus, the worst bit of the Underworld, and it’s honest about grief.
Pamela Butchart’s Icarus Was Ridiculous is for 9 year olds too. Izzy is mad about the Ancient Greeks and has a myth ready for whatever her friends get up to. Zach won’t stop drinking tea at breakfast on a school trip, so he gets Icarus.
People still die in Izzy’s myths, Icarus and Narcissus and Achilles among them, though she never stops on it for long. There’s more Izzy on my best Pamela Butchart books list.
At 8, Julius Zebra: Grapple with the Greeks! has Heracles, who Julius calls Hairy Keith, sending a zebra and his friends into a maze on Crete after a golden apple. Julius cannot say Hesperides.
Jon Scieszka’s It’s All Greek to Me starts backstage at a school play, with three boys in bed-sheet togas. A tinfoil thunderbolt hits the wrong backpack and they end up face to face with Cerberus, with one song on the lyre between them.
Greek mythology books for 10 year olds
Percy Jackson and the Greek Gods by Rick Riordan
Percy Jackson and the Greek Gods
Percy tells it like gossip about the family down the road. In the beginning there’s nothing but Chaos, a gloomy, soupy mist. Gaea, the Earth, wishes herself a sky for a husband and gets Ouranos. “It goes badly. VERY badly.”
Twelve Titan children later, Percy reckons they’re basically a reality TV show. Kronos, the youngest, takes on a horrible job for his mum in return for a scythe and cookies with sprinkles.
It’s real mythology under the jokes, and Percy doesn’t skip the grim bits. Kronos attacks his own father with that scythe, there’s golden blood everywhere, and later he swallows his own babies whole. One joke is very cheeky about where the scythe lands. Expect Mom rather than Mum, as this is the American edition.
Percy Jackson and the Greek Heroes does the same for twelve heroes. It opens with Perseus, who ends up flying away from the Gorgons’ cave with Medusa’s head in a leather sack, and the blood is described.
If it’s Percy’s own adventures they want next, the five Olympians novels begin with The Lightning Thief. I’ve gone through how dark each one gets in what age are the Percy Jackson books for, and once they’ve finished all five there’s what to read after Percy Jackson.
Myths and legends from beyond Greece
The Last Fallen Star by Graci Kim
The Last Fallen Star
Riley Oh’s family are Gom, a Korean clan of healing witches descended from the Cave Bear Goddess, and her mum and dad run a clinic. Her sister Hattie turns thirteen in two days and will be initiated in front of hundreds of people from five clans. Riley was adopted and is saram, which means no magic whatsoever.
Then their mum lets slip that there’s a spell for sharing magic with a saram. It’s dangerous, and she shuts the book with a thud. Hattie decides they’re casting it at her initiation anyway, and Riley, who breaks out in hives at the thought of breaking a rule, goes along with it.
Riley tells the story herself and cries at absolutely everything, which she knows. She’s nearly thirteen and the voice is American, so it reads at the older end of 9. The Last Fallen Moon comes next.
For Norse gods, there’s Neil Gaiman’s Odd and the Frost Giants. Odd is twelve, has walked on a crutch since a tree came down on his leg, and lives on a fjord in Norway where the winter won’t end. A fox leads him to a bear and an eagle, and your reader will probably work out who those three are well before Odd does. His father’s death is told plainly.
Rick Riordan does the Norse gods much louder in 9 From the Nine Worlds, nine short stories where Thor is running a lap of every world in leather shorts to clock ten million steps.
The Red Pyramid is Riordan’s Egyptian one and sits a year older, at 11. On Christmas Eve, Carter and Sadie Kane’s dad takes them into the British Museum after hours, writes glowing hieroglyphs on the Rosetta Stone, and it explodes.
Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky brings in the gods and heroes of Black American stories, John Henry, Brer Rabbit and Anansi among them. Tristan’s best friend Eddie died in a bus accident a few weeks before it starts, and his parents send him to the family farm in Alabama.
Just so you know…
Every book on this page is in Little Reads, a library app for 5 to 11 year olds with 3,000+ hand-picked books. They’re in the full library, which is £7.99 a month after a 7-day free trial. Cancel anytime.
A free account has 100+ free books, if you’d like a look round first. It’s for a child who has already fallen for the myths and wants the next story.