Overview
Hawthorne retells Greek myths in a voice shaped for younger readers, making ancient stories easier to enter without stripping away their strange moral tensions.
This title is catalogued in Fantasy & Children's. Its reading profile is Medium and Moderate, with themes including fantasy, children, coming of age.
One-Page Summary
A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys retells Greek myths for children while deliberately keeping their strangeness, violence, and moral ambiguity alive. Hawthorne presents stories involving figures such as Pandora, the Gorgon, the Golden Touch, and the Three Golden Apples, but frames them as narratives being told to a group of children by an imaginative storyteller. The result is not a textbook of mythology. Hawthorne reshapes the old tales so that children can experience them as living stories while still encountering their deeper questions about greed, curiosity, punishment, jealousy, courage, and the consequences of desire.
His retellings are especially interested in the psychological moment when a character chooses something that cannot be undone. King Midas receives exactly what he thinks he wants and discovers that the wish itself can destroy the value of everything around him. Pandora opens what should have remained closed because curiosity is stronger than caution. These myths become miniature experiments in human behavior. Hawthorne’s prose is lyrical and playful, but he does not flatten the stories into simple moral lessons. The characters often make understandable choices and suffer consequences they could not fully predict.
That tension gives the collection its lasting appeal. It is a book of myths, but also a demonstration of how old stories survive by changing shape. Hawthorne asks what happens when ancient tragedies are retold for children—and finds that the myths remain powerful precisely because children can still recognize the desires that caused them.
Key Themes
Fantasy: This title is tagged with fantasy as one of its main themes.
Children: This title is tagged with children as one of its main themes.
Coming of age: This title is tagged with coming of age as one of its main themes.