Tiny Hercules – at a glance
The School Reading Lists’ five word review: Superhero, banishment, accident-prone, small.
Children’s book title: Tiny Hercules.
Children’s author: Jon Lock.
Children’s illustrator: Nich Angell.
Genre: Children’s fiction.
Published by: Macmillan Children’s Books.
ISBN: 9781035059645.
Recommended for children aged: 9-12.
First published: Paperback February 2026.
This children’s book is ideal for: less confident readers or those who prefer humorous or graphic novels.
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Our review:
Tiny Hercules is on a mission, but not willingly! He’s also not the superhero everyone expects, as, like his friends, he’s the size of a jam jar! Having ruined Tiny Zeus’s latest party, he finds himself banished to planet Earth to undertake twelve tasks in order to be able to return. The first is to defeat a lion! Unfortunately, he lands in a small town called Chutney-on-Toast, and they don’t have lions!
Ten-year-old Jeff, however, has a cat called Socrates and, if you’re the size of a jam jar, could very well be a lion! Dealing with unscrupulous contractors and a very angry swan, who shares more than a passing resemblance to Zeus, means the task isn’t as easy as he’d hoped. He is optimistic about his future tasks, however, especially as he’s now living in Jeff’s scientific experiment, which happens to be a very small house inside their recently saved home.
Our verdict:
This is the first in a new graphic novel series and is a new take on the twelve labours of Hercules, which is reader-friendly from the start. The illustrations are bright, cheerful and humorous, while the storyline is laugh-out-loud funny and has an extra, shorter story at the end. The miniature demigods are a novel idea which should provide more funny and fun books about the other quests in the future.
Teaching points and book club discussion ideas:
- Greek legends have been used in films, adult, and children’s fiction for many years. Do you think the different adaptations would be as entertaining if you didn’t know the original stories, or does that not matter?
- If you were to draw your own graphic novel about someone tiny, how would you show just how small they were?
- All the demigods have special talents. What superpowers would you give your own graphic novel main character?
- At the end of the book, there are instructions to draw Tiny Hercules. Did you try this and, if so, how easy did you find it? Did your Hercules look like the original?
- The author and illustrator are both drawn in their bios. In a cross-curricular activity with art, draw a caricature of yourself as you would like to see it in a graphic novel.
Many thanks to Macmillan Children’s Books for the review copy.
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