The Lost Hero

The Lost Hero is a fantasy novel for young readers by the American writer Rick Riordan, published in 2010 and based on Greek and Roman mythology.

Jason, Piper and Leo are the three who are carried off to Camp Half-Blood, and the novel moves between their points of view as they work out who they are. Jason has no memory of his life before the school bus, though his body remembers how to fight and he is surprised by things a Roman demigod would find ordinary. Piper is a daughter of Aphrodite with a missing father and a talent for persuasion she would rather not use. Leo, a son of Hephaestus, can make machines that work and cannot keep his hands off other people's. The three of them are sent to find a goddess who has been taken, and the search doubles as an introduction to the camp's politics, its prophecy and its enemies. Riordan builds the book on classical myth, and the gods and monsters are handled as if they were current affairs, with the humour that comes from placing them in a modern America of summer camps and school buses.

The novel is the first of a series about the Greek and Roman camps, and the Roman side of the mythology is what it adds to the books that came before.