A blog for young readers (and YA lovers) from the Providence Athenaeum.
The Providence Athenaeum is a unique library and cultural center in the heart of Providence, Rhode Island. Growing out of the Providence Library Company (fourth library in the United States), the Athenaeum as we know it was formed in 1836. Our handsome building on the corner of Benefit and College was completed in 1838.
We are one of the few surviving membership libraries in the nation. Student memberships are available - visit or call for more information.
This blog is updated by one of our circulation assistants (and YA enthusiast), RJ. Follow us to find out what's new in our Young Adult corner, or just for a daily dose of literary shenanigans.
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Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
What’s New: Olympians by George O’Connor
New the Athenaeum’s YA corner are four graphic novels in George O’Connor’s series adapting Greek myths, Olympians. The stories of Zeus, Hera, Hades and our namesake, Athena, are retold in beautiful full cover in these hardcover comics. From O’Connor’s website:
It began when I was in the sixth grade. By then I’d read every book in my local library on the Greek and Norse myths. I was home sick from school one day, and my parents brought me a copy of “The Mighty Thor,” published by Marvel Comics… I had always loved comics, but that copy of Thor, with its gods and monsters and lightning and drama, changed what comics could be for me.
The stories that make up the body of Greek myths are what remain of an ancient culture’s deeply held beliefs… They were, and are, an explanation of the world that that ancient culture’s people saw around them: a lightning storm could only be the King of Gods hurling his thunderbolt; a volcano could only be the escaped vapors of an entombed Titan.
The Greek myths are very, very old, older than the written word. As such there is no “bible,” no one set version of how events had occurred. In the ancient days, local peoples had their own stories of how things came to be. A lot of times these stories were not in agreement with each other… Each of these tellers, as did each of the tellers before them, added a little something of their own to the telling. In my retellings of these stories, as the original superhero stories, I went as far back to the original sources as I could. There are many great retellings of the Greek myths available (I even recommend some elsewhere on this site) but I avoided the versions of other modern storytellers. As I added my own twists here and there, I made connections that were not so apparent before and condensed a couple of characters into one, all in the interest of creating a whole tapestry of Greek mythology. I hope you enjoy reading these stories as much as I’ve enjoyed creating them.
Look for this series on the YA corner’s Graphic Novel shelf!
