Book: The Lightning Thief
Author: Rick Riordan
Pages: 375/375
I recently read the book The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan. The book is about a boy named Percy Jackson that is always being kicked out of boarding schools. When he gets kicked out of his sixth grade boarding school, he goes back home to his mother and step-dad. He doesn’t remember anything about his real father, only a faint smile. His mother and he decide to go down to the beach and when they are there, a hurricane hits. Percy’s friend, Grover, who turns out to be half-man half-goat, comes and tells them both to run away. Percy, his mother, and Grover get in their car and drive to a hill. Percy is ordered to try and get to something over a hill when a Minotaur attacks. Percy defeats it and earns its horn, but not without his mother being vaporized and Grover being knocked out cold. Percy drags Grover over the hill and makes it to a camp that is for people who are half-human and half-god (that means Percy’s biological father was a god). Percy heals from all his wounds and is taught to battle. Then while playing capture-the-flag, Poseidon, who is one of the Big Three (the most powerful gods), claims Percy as his son. Since Percy is the son of Poseidon, he is granted a quest to try and retrieve Zeus’s Master Bolt, which is an extremely powerful bolt of lightning. Somebody had stolen it and Zeus wants it back, and Chiron, the camp activities director, thinks Hades stole it. So he sends Percy to the Underworld to retrieve it. After a long series of traps along the way, Percy, Grover, and his friend Annabeth get to the Underworld and find out Hades didn’t steal it. They figure out that Ares, the god of war, stole Zeus’s Master Bolt. Percy recovers it and returns it to Zeus.
I really liked this book because there is a lot of action and humor. It is all based on Greek mythology and I like that because it taught me a lot of stuff that I didn’t know before. What’s also cool is that in the book, all of the Greek temples and stuff are located in the western hemisphere. For example, Mount Olympus is located on the 600th floor of the Empire State Building, and Medusa owns a garden gnome shop (with life-sized replicas). I would recommend this book to anyone who is the least bit interested in Greek mythology.