The Lost Hero

Rick Riordan's The Lost Hero is a funny, fast demigod adventure for 10 year olds that starts with a boy waking up on a school bus with no idea who he is.

What happens

Jason is holding hands with a girl he doesn't recognise. The boy in the seat in front says they're best friends. Jason can't even work out how old he is.

The bus is taking the Wilderness School (a boarding school for "bad kids", as Leo cheerfully puts it) on a trip to the Grand Canyon. Their coach is tiny, shouty and keeps order with a baseball bat. Then a storm parks itself right over the glass walkway, and the coach kicks off his shoes. He has hooves.

What follows is a full-on monster fight, a flying chariot and a crash landing in a camp lake, all in the first few chapters. The camp is for kids with one human parent and one Greek god. One of its campers has gone missing, and the girl leading the search was promised she'd find the answer on that walkway.

The chapters swap between Jason, Piper and Leo, so you're inside a different head each time. Leo is the funniest by a mile. He rewires the coach's megaphone so it booms "The cow says moo" and builds a helicopter out of pipe cleaners. Piper is the one to watch, though. She's keeping a secret from everyone, a dream that's told her that her dad's life depends on her doing as she's told.

If your reader has already loved Percy Jackson, this is the same world with brand-new heroes. Who doesn't want more Camp Half-Blood?

Worth knowing before you hand it over

These heroes are older than in the first Percy books, around fifteen, and there's some romance (Piper has been going out with Jason, and he can't remember a thing about it). On the trip some girls taunt Piper about her Cherokee dad, with nasty remarks about rain dances and drinking. And the brave little coach is carried off by the storm, with nobody sure if he'll be back.

For a confident reader who's used to monster battles, it'll be gripping. A child who's upset by unkind teasing might want to talk that part through.

What to read next

It builds on the world of an earlier series, so the best place to begin is at the start of that one. In The Lightning Thief, Percy is twelve, at a school for troubled kids in New York, and fairly sure one of his teachers isn't human.