Percy Jackson and the Olympians 5 – The Last Olympian

Rick Riordan's The Last Olympian is the finish of the Percy Jackson run, an adventure for 10 year olds that opens with a pegasus landing on a car bonnet.

What happens

This is the fifth book and the end of the whole story, so it is not the place to start. Percy has a week to go until he turns sixteen, and there is a prophecy about what happens when he does.

Before any of that, he is having a good afternoon. He has borrowed his stepdad's car, he is parked on a ridge above the Atlantic with his friend Rachel, and she has just asked him, more or less, why he has not kissed her yet.

Then Blackjack the pegasus drops out of the sky onto the bonnet, Charles Beckendorf slides off his back in a bronze breastplate with a bag of explosives, and the afternoon is over.

Their target is a cruise ship called the Princess Andromeda, lit up yellow and white like a party boat, with a figurehead of a chained woman who looks horrified at what she is carrying. It is packed with monsters. It is heading for New York. The plan is to blow it up before it arrives.

What makes Percy such good company, five books in, is that the voice has never got grand. He mentions that his father is Poseidon in the same tone he uses about the dents in his stepdad's Prius. The chapter headings are still jokes. Two monsters bicker about meat loaf sandwiches while he creeps past them on the stairs.

Underneath the jokes the weight has shifted. Beckendorf takes out a photograph of his girlfriend and looks at it before they go in. Percy promises him they will both get back to camp. You are meant to notice that promise.

One thing to be clear about. This is the war book. It opens with two boys planting explosives on a ship full of monsters, both of them quietly worried about getting home, and the danger reads as real rather than cartoonish. A reader who has come up through the first four will be ready for that. A reader dropping in here will be lost.

What to read next

Start at the beginning instead. The Lightning Thief is in the library, and it opens with Percy at twelve, on a school trip to a museum in Manhattan, about to have a very bad day with his pre-algebra teacher.