“Percy Jackson, twelve, discovers he is the son of Poseidon and that someone has stolen Zeus's master lightning bolt.”
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The Lightning Thief is Rick Riordan's 2005 middle-grade fantasy novel, the first volume of the Percy Jackson & the Olympians pentalogy and the book that established Riordan as the major middle-grade fantasy writer of the post-Harry Potter era. Percy Jackson, twelve, has been kicked out of six schools by the time the novel opens. At Yancy Academy in upstate New York, where his mother has placed him for his sixth-grade year, his Latin teacher Mr. Brunner gives him a strange field trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A Fury attacks. Percy's best friend Grover Underwood reveals he is a satyr. Mr. Brunner reveals he is the centaur Chiron. Percy is the son of Poseidon, a half-blood demigod, and the prime suspect in the theft of Zeus's master lightning bolt.
Riordan's project is the careful construction of a contemporary American urban-fantasy where the Greek pantheon has relocated to the New World (Olympus is on the 600th floor of the Empire State Building, the Underworld entrance is in Los Angeles, Camp Half-Blood operates from Long Island as a summer camp for demigod children). The Riordan voice (the first-person Percy narration, with the comic timing of a smart twelve-year-old in over his head) became the defining mode of 2000s and 2010s middle-grade fantasy. The road-trip structure (Percy, Annabeth, and Grover travel from Camp Half-Blood to Los Angeles to retrieve the bolt) is the patient quest-narrative engine the rest of the pentalogy builds on.
Recommended as required middle-grade fantasy reading, as the right Riordan entry point, and for fans of J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, Diana Wynne Jones's Chrestomanci, and Holly Black's Modern Faerie Tales. Read The Sea of Monsters (2006), The Titan's Curse (2007), The Battle of the Labyrinth (2008), and The Last Olympian (2009) next, then the Heroes of Olympus follow-up pentalogy. The 2023 Disney+ series is one of the strongest middle-grade-fantasy screen adaptations. The Jesse Bernstein audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.
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