Greek Goddess Diaries

There has been a huge trend for so-called ‘feminist retellings’ of classical myth in recent years, with bookstore shelves groaning under piles of novels in the voices of characters like Medusa, Circe and Helen, despite the fact that they always got to tell their side of the story – from being the central protagonists in Ancient Greek dramas like Antigone and Medea, to featuring in the Roman poet Ovid’s Heroides, a series of dramatic monologues written as letters from Penelope, Phaedra, Ariadne and others around 20BC.

Sat bang in the middle of a Venn diagram with two other contemporary children’s publishing trends – non-fiction about the lives of ‘rebel girls’ and middle-grade fiction written in diary form – the Greek Goddess Diaries feels slightly like publishing-by-numbers, and the whole thing doesn’t quite live up to its billing. Few of the six speakers are actually goddesses for a start – I’d have been much more interested to hear Athena, Hera or Aphrodite speak about their lives on Mount Olympus than Medusa or Ariadne retell their over familiar stories. And despite being billed as ‘Dork Diaries meets Greek myths’ they are barely diaries. The bulk of the stories are recounted in a single present-tense entries beginning with the heroine’s birth, which isn’t how diaries work at all. The six women all speak in the same ‘feisty heroine’ tone too, which leads to some weird dissonances. ‘I murdered all our children’ Medea confesses, before adding that since then ‘I married the Athenian king and we had a son so, maybe, just maybe, my future diary entries will be less bloodstained…’ !! LOL!

I’m being a bit harsh, perhaps. I’m sure these short retellings would be fun to share in a classroom, and the list of Primary sources – from Euripides to Hesiod to Homer – show Honor Cargill-Martin is a serious classicist who knows her stuff, whilst Camelia Pham’s stylish illustrations are particularly great at bringing to life lesser-known stories like that of Atalanta and Penthesilea. But shoehorning these complex female figures into some feisty ‘ancient sisterhood’ erases a lot of the strangeness and moral complexity that makes these myths endure.