Who Let the Gods Out

Maz Evans's Who Let the Gods Out is a laugh-out-loud adventure for 9 year olds about a boy with a secret and a star that crashes into his cowshed.

What happens

Elliot Hooper is twelve and very, very tired. He keeps nodding off in assembly, his grades are sliding and Mr Boil, the world's worst history teacher, is on the warpath.

The real trouble is at home. Elliot's mum has started forgetting things. Small things at first, then big ones, like wandering off into the fields after dark. Elliot 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 away in a week unless someone finds twenty thousand pounds.

Then a clump of stars falls out of the night sky and lands in the cow dung. It's Virgo, from the Zodiac Council, who has sneaked away from a job that mostly involves ordering paper clips. She's here to deliver a flask of ambrosia to someone called Prisoner Forty-Two. She's nearly two thousand years old, she's never had a cold and she's quite sure she's perfect. (She would also like to know whether mortals really make green slime in their noses.)

The jokes come thick and fast. The Zodiac Council ends its meeting in a food fight. Virgo politely asks the cow for directions. She spends a whole night trying to give advice to the people in a soap opera, and she's very offended when they ignore her. Who doesn't love a know-it-all immortal getting everything about Earth slightly wrong?

Things get a lot bigger once the pair set loose Thanatos, the Daemon of Death. The help that arrives is Zeus himself, rather rounder than the statues suggest, with Pegasus in tow.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

There's real sadness under the jokes. Elliot's nan and grandad both died in the last year (that's backstory, not a spoiler), his mum is unwell in a way that frightens him, and he's so short of money that he quietly pockets some from a neighbour's handbag. A child with a poorly parent or grandparent might find those pages hard. For a reader who likes big laughs with a big heart, it's a brilliant mix.

What to read next

If your reader wants more Olympians behaving badly, Percy Jackson's Greek Gods is a great next step. Percy tells the old myths himself, cheeky comments and all, starting from the very beginning of everything.