Goddess Girls – Medea the Enchantress

Goddess Girls - Medea the Enchantress by Joan Holub is an adventure for 8 year olds about a princess whose eyes shoot fire when she loses her temper.

Medea is twelve and the granddaughter of the sun god. When she gets properly cross, golden light rays flash out of her eyes. She once glared at some children who nicked her seashells and gave them all sunburn.

So her family made rules. Lots of them.

Her dad the king has rules about almost everything. What she reads. Who she's allowed to be friends with. When she can start going on dates (he suggests thirty).

She's the only girl at Enchantment Academy who isn't allowed to board, so she travels there and back by wand every single day. That also means she can't try out for the Magicasters Club, because it meets after school. Your reader will feel that one.

We meet her hiding behind a curtain with a gossip magazine she swapped her lunch money for, which is when she overhears her aunt Circe making a prophecy. A thief is coming for the Golden Fleece. And a handsome boy is going to steal Medea's heart.

Circe, who is the school principal and an extremely good arguer, suggests Medea comes away with her to Mount Olympus Academy for a week, out of harm's way.

Medea is thrilled. A whole week somewhere nobody knows her, where she can finally be impressive.

Then she finds out who else is coming. Glauce, who is blonde and brilliant at magic and calls herself Medea's friend while saying things like "don't mess up like you usually do".

Medea has a private word for her, which is frenemy. Anyone who has had one of those will know exactly what this book is about.

The magic and the quest are good fun. What's really going on, though, is a girl trying to work out whether someone actually likes her, and whether her dad will ever stop treating her like a baby.

Worth knowing before you hand it over. Glauce's put-downs are constant and quite skilfully done, and she keeps bringing up an embarrassing thing that happened when Medea was six. A child who is going through something similar might find that uncomfortably close. A child who has already spotted this sort of friend will probably feel rather pleased with themselves.

It's also very American in its slang, so expect a lot of squee.

If your reader likes the idea of children stuck inside stories that everyone already knows, Ever After High - The Storybook of Legends is in the library too. Raven's mother is the Evil Queen, and the school expects her to sign up for exactly the same story.