Goddess Girls – Eos the Lighthearted

Joan Holub's Eos the Lighthearted is a Goddess Girls story for 8 year olds about the goddess of the dawn and her very mortal best friend.

What happens

Eos is twelve, and every morning she paints the sky pink, purple and orange. It takes her half an hour, tops. Then she flies home, spins herself into pink mist and whooshes into her bedroom, which is inside a giant urn in the courtyard. How cool is that?

She's the only goddess at Oceanus Middle School. She does track, runs four clubs and hops from one hobby to the next (she calls it having grasshopper brains). Her best friend is Tithonus, the boy next door, who is obsessed with bugs. Sorry, insects. He'll tell you the difference.

But Tithonus is mortal. One day he'll grow old and Eos won't. The thought makes her heart heavy.

So when her friend Nyx invites her to see a new statue unveiled at the temple of Artemis, Eos has a secret plan. It's a long flight to Ephesus. And someone from Mount Olympus Academy might just know how to make a mortal boy live forever.

There's a lot going on under all the pink sparkle. Eos's dad fought on the losing side of a war and is now a prisoner in the Underworld. She calls her feelings about it "sad-mad-dad" and squashes them down whenever they pop up. When a girl at book club calls the Titans evil, Eos loses her temper and her wings unfurl right there in the library. She's mortified afterwards.

It's a feeling we've probably all had as kids. You try really hard to fit in, and one bad moment makes you feel like the odd one out all over again.

Tithonus is lovely. He holds doors open, holds funerals for his pet beetles (with rhyming poems) and names his new grasshopper Melody. He's the kind of friend who can tease you out of a bad mood.

This is Goddess Girls book twenty-four, but you don't need the others first. Eos has never met the Mount Olympus crowd either, so your reader gets to meet Athena, Aphrodite and Persephone right alongside her.

What to read next

If they'd like to meet Eos's friend properly, Nyx the Mysterious is Nyx's own story, from back when the two of them had never even said hello.