"The Lightning Thief"
Percy Jackson and the Olympians: Book 1




Twelve-year-old Percy Jackson is about to be kicked out of boarding school . . . again. No matter 
how hard he tries, he can't seem to stay out of trouble. But can he really be expected to stand by 
and watch while a bully picks on his scrawny best friend? Or not defend himself against his pre-
algebra teacher when she turns into a monster and tries to kill him? Of course, no one believes 
Percy about the monster incident; he's not even sure he believes himself.

Until the Minotaur chases him to summer camp.

Suddenly, mythical creatures seem to be walking straight out of the pages of Percy's Greek 
mythology textbook and into his life. The gods of Mount Olympus, he's coming to realize, are very 
much alive in the twenty-first century. And worse, he's angered a few of them: Zeus's master 
lightning bolt has been stolen, and Percy is the prime suspect.

Now Percy has just ten days to find and return Zeus's stolen property, and bring peace to a 
warring Mount Olympus. On a daring road trip from their summer camp in New York to the gates 
of the Underworld in Los Angeles, Percy and his friends–one a satyr and the other the demigod 
daughter of Athena–will face a host of enemies determined to stop them. To succeed on his quest, 
Percy will have to do more than catch the true thief: he must come to terms with the father who 
abandoned him; solve the riddle of the Oracle, which warns him of failure and betrayal by a 
friend; and unravel a treachery more powerful than the gods themselves.