Percy Jackson and the Olympians 1 – The Lightning Thief

The first thing the narrator of Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief does is tell you to put the book down.

If you are reading this because you think you might be a half-blood, Percy says, close it now, believe whatever your parents told you about where you came from, and go and have a normal life. Being a half-blood gets you killed in painful, nasty ways.

He is twelve. He has been thrown out of roughly one school a year for as long as he can remember, once over an incident with a Revolutionary War cannon and once over a shark pool, and neither was entirely his fault.

Riordan's real trick is that Percy is genuinely good company. He is not a hero who happens to be funny. He is a bored, cross, fiercely loyal boy who is not much good at pre-algebra, and the jokes belong to him rather than to the author.

The Greek myths arrive sideways. On a school trip to a museum, Percy is put on the spot in front of everyone and turns out to know exactly why Kronos ate his own children, and what Zeus fed him to bring them back up again. The class groans. The teacher is unimpressed. Nobody in the room, Percy least of all, notices that he has just summarised his own life.

Then his maths teacher takes him to one side. Afterwards, not a single person remembers she ever existed.

The pace from there is relentless. Three old women at a roadside fruit stand cut a length of yarn. His best friend turns out to be a goat from the waist down and is extremely touchy about the word donkey. A car tears through a storm on dark country roads.

Something your reader should be ready for. Fairly early on, Percy watches his mother taken by a monster and dissolve into yellow light in front of him, and wakes two days later believing she is gone. The book does not soften it. He grieves for a good stretch afterwards and the world is meant to look wrong to him. This happens near the start rather than as a late twist, so it is a heads up rather than a spoiler.

There is monster fighting throughout. It is action rather than gore, but the danger is real and people get hurt.

If your reader surfaces wanting the actual myths, there is also Percy Jackson's Greek Gods in the library. Same voice, same sarcasm, starting with Gaea gazing up at the nothing above her and deciding what she would really like is a sky.