Echo the Copycat (Goddess Girls)

Echo the Copycat (Goddess Girls)

In this nineteenth Goddess Girls adventure a new forest-mountain nymph shows up at Mount Olympus Academy and tries to fit in. Echo is a forest-mountain nymph and the new girl at Mount Olympus Academy. She is a little nervous, so she tries to mimic all of the gestures, expressions, and slang of the cool MOA students. While imitation is supposed to be the best form of flattery, Echo’s chattiness doesn’t exactly endear her to her fellow classmates—in fact, it has the opposite effect! Will she be able to find a way to be herself and become friends with the students around her? Joan Holub has authored and/or illustrated over 140 children’s books, including the Goddess Girls series, the Heroes in Training series, the New York Times bestselling picture book Mighty Dads (illustrated by James Dean), and Little Red Writing (illustrated by Melissa Sweet). She lives in North Carolina and is online at JoanHolub.com. Suzanne Williams is a former elementary school librarian and the author of over seventy books for children, including the award-winning picture books Library Lil (illustrated by Steven Kellogg) and My Dog Never Says Please (illustrated by Tedd Arnold), and several chapter book and middle grade series. She also coauthors the Goddess Girls and Thunder Girls series with the fantastic Joan Holub. Visit her at Suzanne-Williams.com. Echo the Copycat 1 FirHeart HIGH IN THE BRANCHES OF a tall, tall fir tree called FirHeart, a twelve-year-old nymph named Echo was getting ready for Nature School. This tree belonged to her and she belonged to it. She had lived in it since she’d been born, here in the forested mountains of Boeotia, Greece, and had even built a small, cute tree house in it for herself. Most of her tree’s branches grew horizontally outward from its main trunk, which had made it easy to lay boards to form the floor she stood on now. She’d also built herself a table and a shell-lined sink, and had fitted them into the tree’s natural curves. Instead of walls, there were handrails on three sides of her small house, with the fourth side left open as an entrance. The pulley-and-vine ladder system she’d made in science class helped her reach the tree house from the ground. Echo was busy deciding what to wear to class that morning, when a magic breeze carrying a bunch of scrolls whooshed by and tangled long tendrils of her green hair. Plunk! The breeze dropped an issue of Teen Scrollazine onto the sleeping hammock she’d woven back in fourth grade, causing the hammock to sway gently. “Thanks!” she called to the breeze. But it had already whooshed off to deliver scrolls to the two hundred or so other tree houses in this forest. She went over to the hammock, picked up the scrollazine, and unrolled it, planning to take a quick peek before school. Despite its name, the ’zine appealed to all ages, and it mostly carried articles about the immortals who lived on Mount Olympus. Since this forest was far from Olympus, Echo and her schoolmates never got the ’zine on time. This one was from two weeks ago. Still, everything in it would be new to her, and she would devour the entire thing later tonight. Stuff that happened on Mount Olympus always seemed way more exciting than whatever happened in the forest. In fact, things were kind of boring around here, or so it seemed to her. She glanced at the main article, which was titled “Grand Events Planned at the Immortal Marketplace.” It was about a big celebration that would be happening soon. Something involving a parade with floats, and then a wedding a couple of days later. Turned out that the parade was actually going to take place this very Saturday, and the wedding on Monday. Wouldn’t it be fun to go? she thought dreamily. But Mount Olympus was far away, and besides, nymphs like her rarely left their forest. They had to stay and guard their trees. Alongside the article there was a drawing of Zeus, the Mount Olympus Academy principal, standing next to the beaming couple who were soon to be married. Unfortunately, the bride-to-be wasn’t pictured wearing her wedding chiton. Understandable, though. It was considered bad luck to reveal the gown to everyone before the wedding day. Still, Echo had an interest in fashion and would have loved seeing it. She noted other details in the drawing. A goat stood beside Zeus, and a honeybee was buzzing around the principal’s head. Huh? What was that about? But then, as she unrolled more of the ’zine, her attention was caught by a smaller article that featured a drawing of three MOA students. Apparently they had located something called an herb of invisibility and had won a battle against some giants at the Parthenon. Wow, talk about exciting! At the left of this drawing was a turquoise-haired mergirl named Amphitrite. The article said she was a Nereid, a sea nymph. There were many kinds of nymphs. And like Echo, most were halfway between mortal and immortal, with limited magical powers. Echo recognized the