The Aftermyth, by Tracy Wolff

 

Happy book birthday to The Aftermyth, by Tracy Wolff (middle grade, February 2026 Aladdin)!  Here's how my reading went: I was very happy to get a review copy, and looked forward to it lots, planning on posting about it today.  I started it one evening last week, read five pages, and thought "I will enjoy this." Two hours and 200 pages (out of 448 later, I thought "I want to keep reading because I am really enjoying this!"  Half an hour and another 50 pages read, I thought "I wish it wasn't bedtime; I want to keep reading."  But it was, and so I enjoyed finishing it the next day! From this you can gather that I found it fast, fun, and engrossing.

The Aftermyth is set in a magical Greek mythological boarding school in our real world.  Penelope and her twin brother are starting their first year there, and are confident they will be placed in Athena House, like their parents.  But Penelope gets off to a bad start when she's separated from her brother and reality goes wonky on her in unpleasant ways--the bridge she has to cross turns half way through from wood to snakes, for instance, and more mundanely the trek through the mud of a strange forest in which she finds herself lost wrecks the clean new shoes she carefully picked for her first impression ensemble (very real world middle school relatable-ness, which continues to be nicely interspersed with mythological happenings throughout the book).

And then, horror! Instead of calm, organized, life-of-the-mind Athena House, she's assigned to Aphrodite, the house of sparkles and glitter and glam.  Turns out, though, that though the Aphrodite kids might be everything her parents didn't want her to be, they have something the Athenas (including Penelope's parents and brother) lack--they are emotionally present and caring people.  And so by the end of the book she has realized that having best friends who really are there for her, who think enjoying life is reasonable, is a Very Good Thing, and she stops hoping she'll be moved over to Athena. (She also realized that the sweet snacks of Aphrodite are actually preferable to the apple slice snacks of Anthena, and even though I like a good Athena-esque library as much as anyone, the candy room she gets instead is pretty tempting...)

So that's one big arc of the story.  The other is the mystery of why strange things keep happening to Penelope; no one else, for instance, falls into the underworld when the ground beneath their feet vortexes on them, for instance.  Woven into the school part of the story are discussions of how myths are retold, and why (also really nice done, and I like this thought-provoking-ness lots!).  And this question, of who makes the stories and how and why, is central to the mystery.  

With plenty of splashy magical boarding school fun, a couple of cute guys such as a middle school kid might crush on, some exciting adventure bits, and a mythological mystery to be solved, it is very very easy for me to certain that the target audience will like this lots.  Though mythological boarding schools inevitable make on think of Percy Jackson, I would give this to kids who haven't met him yet.  This is a much more solidly middle grade story, with less epic danger (although more may come as the series continues) and more a feel of what middle grade life is like.  

Short answer:  if the second book were already written and was in my hands, I'd be reading it instead of writing this.