The Red Pyramid

Rick Riordan's The Red Pyramid is an Egyptian gods adventure for 11 year olds that begins on the night a dad blows up the British Museum.

What happens

Carter Kane is fourteen and his home is a suitcase. He travels the world with his dad, an Egyptologist who seems very nervous about something. His sister Sadie has grown up in London with their grandparents. They see each other twice a year and have almost nothing to say to one another.

It's Christmas Eve when their dad takes them to the museum after hours. On the way he stops at Cleopatra's Needle, the place their mum died, and almost tells them what happened there. Then, in front of the Rosetta Stone, he starts writing glowing hieroglyphs on it. The stone explodes.

What steps out is a laughing man made of fire. Their dad is shut inside a golden coffin that sinks straight through the floor. By the next morning the police think he's either dead or a terrorist, and nobody believes a word the children say.

The whole thing is told as a recording, with Carter and Sadie taking turns. They interrupt each other in square brackets and squabble about how they're being described. Sadie's chapters are the funniest by a mile. She's sarcastic, very British and has zero patience for adults (the police inspector gets it with both barrels).

There's something quieter under the jokes too. People keep looking confused when they find out Carter and Sadie are brother and sister, because Carter takes after their dad and Sadie takes after their mum. Both of them hate it. It's one of the first moments where the two of them are properly on the same side.

A few things to know first. Their mum's death is part of the story from the first chapter, as backstory, and their dad being taken is scary. There's fire, a giant snake and a girl drawing a knife as Carter blacks out. There's some mild swearing as well. At the top of the shelf that's fine for most readers, but a younger or more anxious one might find the museum night a lot.

If your reader likes their myths loud, fast and funny, this is a great pick. Where else does a dad hand his children a bike chain and ask them to lock the museum curator in his own office?

What to read next

Rick Riordan does the same with Greek gods in The Lightning Thief, where a twelve-year-old's school trip to the Greek galleries of a museum comes with a maths teacher his best friend says isn't human.