Franchise · Tertiary · since 2005
Percy Jackson
Greek mythology retold for kids who were about to be handed the Iliad. I read these in sixth grade, straight after Harry Potter, and they were always a close second to it. Five books, then five more with the Heroes of Olympus, and a camp on Long Island Sound.
I Accidentally Vaporize My Pre-Algebra Teacher
Chapter one, The Lightning Thief
Greek mythology retold for kids who were about to be handed the Iliad, and the reason a lot of us knew who Kronos was years before school got round to it. The whole series is built on one very good idea: a boy who is bad at school and cannot sit still turns out to be dyslexic because his brain is wired for Ancient Greek, and restless because he has combat reflexes. The things he was failing at were never the problem.
Riordan invented it as bedtime stories for his own son, who has dyslexia and ADHD and had just been taught the myths in class. That is why it lands: it was written to make one specific kid feel like the hero rather than the problem, and it turns out an enormous number of kids needed exactly that.
Step up to the fire and wait.
The Claiming
At Camp Half-Blood nobody tells you who your godly parent is. You wait, sometimes for years, until a symbol burns into the air over your head in front of the whole camp. Until then you sleep on the floor of the Hermes cabin with everybody else nobody has bothered to acknowledge, which is the first genuine injustice the books put in front of you, and Percy spends five books doing something about it.
- Cabin
- …
- Parent
- …
- Domain
- …
One clay bead per summer, painted with the thing that nearly killed everybody