The Son of Neptune

Rick Riordan's The Son of Neptune is a Roman myth adventure for 10 year olds about a demigod who wakes up with no idea who he is.

What happens

Percy Jackson knows his name. He knows he's a demigod. He can picture one face, a girl called Annabeth, and that's about it.

For three days he's been chased across California by two gorgon sisters who work at a discount supermarket (and keep offering him free samples). He beats them. They come back. So he escapes down a hillside on a snack platter. Who else would think of that?

Then an old woman asks him to carry her across a motorway to a hidden camp. She's heavier than she looks, and she isn't quite what she seems either.

The camp is Camp Jupiter. It's a Roman legion run by demigod kids, with ghosts wandering the streets, a two-headed coffee seller and a leader called Reyna who very clearly knows more than she's saying. Percy's arrival makes everyone nervous. There's a big feast in five days, and something huge is coming for the camp when it arrives.

Anyone who's read a Percy book before will know how this feels. You hear everything through Percy's jokes, even when he's exhausted and scared. He asks if they really have a feast for tuna. He tells Reyna he's "been told that I smell". It's very hard not to laugh.

He also makes two new friends straight away. Hazel is brave and bossy in the best way, and Frank is a big, soft-hearted archer who's already in trouble with Reyna. You can tell the three of them are going to matter.

There's a lot of monster fighting. It's more funny than gory, though. Gorgons crumble to dust and come back cross, and one of them is mostly worried about her cheese and wiener samples.

Percy's sixteen here, and he's clearly had big adventures before. There are clues on the bead necklace he can't remember getting. If you've got a reader who likes piecing a mystery together while the action races on, this is perfect.

What to read next

If they haven't met Percy before, his story starts in The Lightning Thief. He's twelve there, at a school for troubled kids, and field trips have a habit of going very wrong for him.