Little Goddess Girls – Persephone & the Giant Flowers

Joan Holub and Suzanne Williams's Persephone & the Giant Flowers is a Little Goddess Girls adventure for 7 year olds about a flower-loving girl with a very bad case of bad luck-itis.

What happens

Persephone has leaves and flowers growing from her dress and daisies on top of her head. She's also convinced her bad luck rubs off on everyone around her. So she's off to Sparkle City, high up on Mount Olympus, to ask the super-duper powerful Zeus to make her lucky.

She isn't going alone. Her new friend Athena was blown to this magic land by a storm and wants Zeus to help her get home. Athena has golden winged sandals (she's still learning to steer them) and a little white dog called Oliver.

They're supposed to stay on the Hello Brick Road, where snake-haired Medusa can't get at them. Instead the sandals drag them down a crack in the ground and into Wunderworld. That's Wunderworld spelled with a U, as the girls point out!

It's a funny, slightly spooky place. There's a huge dog with three heads, a sign that says only rotten people are welcome and a garden of giant singing flowers. Some of those flowers get a bit too friendly with Persephone.

Then there's a cross voice shouting for help from inside a shell. Out pops Aphrodite, who admits she can be hard to like. She says whatever comes into her head, and some of her comebacks to Medusa are very funny!

Kids who know a bit about Greek myths will enjoy spotting the gods. Kids who know The Wizard of Oz might notice the Hello Brick Road. And kids who know neither will still get a fast, bouncy adventure with short chapters and lots of sound effects. Whoosh! Crack!

What's lovely underneath is the friendship stuff. Persephone has only ever had flower friends before. She really wants a best friend, and she has to work out that you can't make someone like you. That's a very real worry at this age.

At the back there's a word list with help saying the tricky names, plus a few questions to chat about together. That makes it a nice one to share.

What to read next

This book follows on from the first in the series. If you'd like to see how Athena arrived in Mount Olympus in the first place, go back to Athena & the Magic Land.