Gina Rae Mitchell

My Best Friend Athena by Dana Hammer | Spotlight ~ Guest Post from the Author ~ $10 Gift Card

A book blog tour from Goddess Fish Promotions.

Thank you to the author, publisher, and Marianne & Judy at Goddess Fish for providing me with the information for this tour.

Book Details

My Best Friend Athena by Dana Hammer
Published by Cinnabar Moth Publishing LLC on 02/23/2023
Genres: Fiction, Fantasy, Middle-Grade
Format: eBook, Hardcover, Paperback
Pages: 232

Fanny Fitzpatrick has the coolest best friend ever. Athena is smart, and pretty, and brave, and kind. Fanny loves her friend, but sometimes, she feels a little jealous of how perfect Athena is.

But even "perfect" girls make mistakes, and Athena makes a big one when she accidentally turns the school bully into a cockroach. He was picking on their friend Gemma and Athena lost her temper and her magic powers just slipped out right in front of Fanny.

Now Fanny knows that Athena isn't an ordinary girl - she's the reincarnation of a Greek goddess, powers and all - and now she needs Fanny and Gemma's help to hunt down the bully-turned-cockroach and turn him back into a human boy.

Fanny doesn't want to spend all her time looking for a cockroach. She's got the Junior Miss Super Pretty Pageant to prepare for, if she can get over her stage fright. Besides, Athena's Dad, Zeus, has forbidden the girls from meddling with any more cockroaches or magic, and Zeus is a god you don't want to mess with.

Fanny has to make a choice. Should she pursue her pageant dreams, or risk Zeus' wrath to find the cockroach-boy? What's the right thing to do? And how do you hunt down a cockroach anyway?

 

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Excerpt from My Best Friend Athena

By the time I get home, everyone in town knows about Daniel’s disappearance, including my mom, which explains why she grabs me as soon as I walk in the door, like I’ve just returned from war or something. She hugs me so tightly I’m pretty sure it damages my intestines. “Honey, I’m so glad you’re home. Where were you?”

“Athena’s. Remember? I told you where I was gonna be.”

“A boy’s gone missing! I had no idea where you were! I was terrified.”

This is what happens when a kid goes missing. Your mom completely forgets about any conversations you had earlier in the day, because all she can think about is the fact that a kid is missing, and it scrambles her brains.

“I’m sorry you were worried, Mom. But…um…a boy’s gone missing, you say?”

I’m such a bad actress.

“Yes! It’s all over the news. I got an amber alert just a few minutes ago. His name was Daniel Doyle. I think they said he went to your school. Do you know this boy?”

I panic inside. What am I supposed to say? “Yeah, I know him, and he’s a total douche-nozzle, and Athena turned him into a cockroach, but it’s ok. We’re working on it.”

No. I can not say that to my mom. Instead, I will deny everything.

“No.”

“Really?”

I can tell that my mom doesn’t believe me. She has that skeptical look on her face that she gets when I lie. Probably because I’m a terrible liar. I can’t look her in the eyes, and my face turns bright red. It’s the worst.

Excerpt provided by the author/publisher for use in this post.

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Purchase Links for My Best Friend Athena

Amazon – OneLink for every country   

Bookshop

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I love my Amazon Kindle Unlimited Subscription. So many books, so little time!

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Guest Post from Dana Hammer

Crafting With My Daughter: an Account of My Failures

I wrote My Best Friend Athena so I could share my writing with my daughter. Typically, I write horror-comedy, with very adult themes, so this was a way for me to branch out, and write something my daughter could actually read. It was quite a departure for me, but a fun one. But parenting has changed a lot about my life, and writing a kids book wasn’t the only departure for me. Another change I’ve made is exploring the strange and exotic world of crafting.

I didn’t grow up crafting. At all. I’m not even sure I owned a set of crayons, much less paints, and popsicle sticks and cotton balls and all the things kids make crafts from. It just wasn’t something that my parents considered important, and so, I didn’t either.

I hated art in school. I vividly remember this terrible project where we had to make a gigantic turkey out of tiny scraps of tissue paper, and it was the most tedious thing I’ve ever done in my life. I was terrible at drawing. I remember getting in a fight with my second grade teacher because she said I had to draw my person with hands and feet, and I explained “It’s not a real person. It doesn’t need hands and feet.” So, this is the level of artistic skill we’re dealing with.

But then, along came my daughter, and she’s a very creative person. She’s always making things. She made a gigantic “hatchimal house” out of cardboard, which contains furniture, a kitchen, a dance floor, a slide, and a TV room. She makes contraptions that lift and lower stuff from her bunk bed to the floor and back. She especially likes making games. Some of her board games are actually pretty fun, like the one where we have to draw letters from a bowl and make words with them, and get scored based on how long the word is. (I didn’t have the heart to tell her that she’d basically invented Scrabble.)

Some of the games are less fun (the one where she turned our hallway into a playing field, and we had to throw a ping-pong ball at scraps of paper she had strewn around, and try to hit them exactly, to score points. It was too challenging to be fun.) But regardless, she’s a creative kid, and I want to encourage that.

So. I want to be a good mom, who spends quality time with her daughter doing enriching activities. And I’m trying. I swear. But here’s the thing — crafting is hard. It’s really, really hard.

We tried cheerio fairy wands, and they turned into gooey blobs on sticks. We tried to make our own cornhole set out of cardboard and hand-sewn beanbags — the result was a lot of wasted cardboard and some disturbing looking beanbags.

We tried making big necklaces out of oatmeal lids and…you know, it seemed like a good idea at the time. (Though, in my defense, my daughter still has her oatmeal lid necklace, she just doesn’t wear it. It’s hanging from a nail on her wall. Since she likes it enough to keep it, I’m not calling that a total failure.)

We tried making our own perfume from jasmine we picked from our yard, but I didn’t have alcohol, which the website said I needed, so I tried to substitute lemon vodka…disaster. You’d think it would have just added a nice lemony fragrance, but no. It did not.

I like to think I’m teaching my daughter the importance of perseverance, and not giving up when things are hard to do, but in reality, I’m probably just teaching her how not to craft.

But I like to think that my bad example will be helpful to her in the future. Maybe one day, my daughter will have a daughter of her own, and she’ll stand in the kitchen with her, stirring the cheerio batter and saying “My mom added too much butter, and so they never stuck in the right shape. But we know better, don’t we?”

She’ll smile down at her daughter and her daughter will smile back at her, and they will add the correct amount of butter, and cut their cheerio batter into perfect stars. And they’ll wave their cheerio wands around, with beautiful ribbons tied to them, and this perfect moment will have been brought to them by my sad failures. And they will dab some homemade perfume on their wrists, and it won’t smell like an abandoned distillery, and together they’ll move on to a new adventure.

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Purchase My Best Friend Athena book online from a local bookstore.

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Amazon – OneLink for every country   

If the above link does not take you to your country, here are a few more:

Amazon – Canada

Amazon – France

Amazon – Germany

Amazon – United Kingdom

Please send me a note if your country isn’t listed and you would like to purchase using my links. Using my link does not change the price you pay. Amazon pays me a minimal amount out of their share. 

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Giveaway!

Dana Hammer will award a $10 Amazon or Barnes and Noble GC to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour.

Visit more stops on this Goddess Fish tour for extra chances to win!

Official Tour Page for My Best Friend Athena

Full Tour Schedule:

February 6: All the Ups and Downs
February 7: Literary Gold
February 8: Westveil Publishing
February 9: Fabulous and Brunette
February 10: Kit ‘N Kabookle – review only
February 10: Books in the Hall
February 13: Sandra’s Book Club
February 14: Gina Rae Mitchell
February 15: Sybrina’s Book Blog
February 16: Hope. Dreams. Life… Love
February 16: Long and Short Reviews
February 17: Joanne Guidoccio

a Rafflecopter giveaway

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