The Lightning Thief: Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Book 1 by Rick Riordan

My niece, Sailor, recommended this book to me. It's the first in a series, and I guess it's pretty popular because I was on the waiting list at the library for weeks before it was available to check out.

Percy Jackson is a twelve-year-old boy who was just kicked out of a private boarding school for troubled youth. But something strange is going on and Percy starts having encounters with mythological gods and creatures that he has only read about in textbooks. Who is Percy and what is going on?? Once he figures some of that out, he also learns that he is being accused of stealing Zeus' lightning bolt and that he has ten days to rectify the situation. Percy and his friends jump into action.

I had a difficult time reading and enjoying this book because I kept comparing it to Harry Potter. If I had never read Harry Potter, I think I would have found this story to be original and fun. However, there were too many similarities to Harry Potter (being a "half-blood", the mystery of who your parents are and what happened to them, boarding school, magic, the two sidekicks - one female, one male) that it made me think that this was a wannabe Harry Potter story, lacking in originality.