The Lightning Thief

The Lightning Thief was published in 2005 and was the first children's novel by Rick Riordan, who had previously written a series of crime novels for adults. It opens a five-book sequence and a wider set of spin-offs known together as the Camp Half-Blood Chronicles, and it moved Greek mythology into the American middle-grade market at a scale that had not happened before: the film adaptation arrived in 2010, and a Disney+ series covering the same book ran at the end of 2023.

Percy's situation is built out of two things at once. The first is a home life he is not proud of: a mother he loves, a stepfather who is unpleasant to be around, and a set of learning difficulties that the book treats as a feature of being a demigod rather than a defect. The second is a quest with a countdown, and Riordan keeps the classical monsters plausible by putting them in ordinary American places: a recording studio, a roadside diner and a stretch of desert highway.

Camp Half-Blood supplies the cast the rest of the series works with, including Annabeth Chase, and Grover Underwood is the satyr who takes responsibility for getting Percy across the country. Riordan's version of the myths is fast and irreverent, and the books' interest in absent parents and the gods' habit of leaving their children to manage has proved durable.