Percy Jackson and the Greek Heroes

Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson and the Greek Heroes is a very funny book of Greek myths for 10 year olds, retold by a demigod who says he's only in it for the pizza.

What happens

Percy explains right at the start. The publisher liked his book about the gods so much they wanted another, and a year's supply of free pizza (plus blue jelly beans) did the rest. So here he is, telling the stories of twelve heroes from about four thousand years ago.

He starts with Perseus, partly because they share a name and partly because Perseus is one of the few who gets a happy ending. That doesn't mean his life was easy. A prophecy says Danaë's son will kill her father, the king, so the king locks her in an underground bronze cell. When a baby arrives anyway, he nails mother and child into a wooden box and throws it into the sea.

It only gets wilder from there. There's a fisherman who finds the box, a creepy king who wants to marry Danaë, a party where everyone brings wedding presents and a promise Perseus really shouldn't have made. Before long he's flying away from the Gorgons' cave with Medusa's head in a leather sack.

If your reader has already met Percy in his own adventures, they'll know the voice. It's cheeky and chatty and full of modern jokes. Zeus introduces himself in capital letters with something that sounds a lot like a chat-up line, and Poseidon feeds the castaways sardines through the airholes (Percy points out that his dad is awesome that way).

These are the real myths, though, and Percy doesn't tidy them up. He promises poisonings, betrayals and murders in the introduction and he means it. Medusa loses her head with the blood described, and Zeus falling for mortal girls is played for laughs. None of it lingers, but it's a lot more grown-up than a picture-book version of the Greek stories. A reader who's happy with the Percy Jackson novels will be fine. A younger or more sensitive one might enjoy it more sharing it with you.

The nice surprise is how much they'll learn without noticing. City-states, oracles, Gorgons, how Pegasus was born. It all goes in because Percy is such good company.

What to read next

If they finish wanting the whole family tree of Olympus, Percy Jackson's Greek Gods is the one to read next. It starts right back at the very beginning with Chaos, a soupy mist whose name, Percy tells you, literally means the Gap.