User blog:Cloudmonkey/Book Talk: The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan

My name is Percy Jackson. I'm twelve years old and until recently I was a student at Yancy Academy, a private school for troubled kids in upstate New York. I've always had trouble with school; I have ADD and dyslexia, but I'm not really a trouble maker. Somehow though trouble always seems to find me. I've always known I was a little different but I never realized how different until I accidentally vaporized my pre-algebra teacher, Mrs. Dodds. It's because she turned out to be a monster: bat wings, claws, yellow fangs—really ugly. She attacked me during our field trip to the museum. I killed her with a ballpoint pen my Latin teacher, Mr. Brunner, gave me. He threw me the pen and it turned into a sword. I swung it and Hisss! It vaporized her. Then it changed back into a ballpoint pen. Weird. The funny thing was nobody even noticed. Not only that—nobody even remembered her afterward—not even my friend Grover.

Turns out I'm a half-blood, the child of a Greek god and a human. When a half-blood reaches about twelve years old, monsters start to smell them and search them out. Mr. Brunner and my friend Grover were actually there to protect me. Now I'm at Camp Half-blood with a bunch of other kids my age. I'm safe now, but my mom died helping to get me here. I'm still kind of numb from it. The thing is, when the Minotaur killed her, shortly before I killed it, my mom vaporized the way monsters do when we kill them. So maybe she isn't really dead. Maybe I can go to the Underworld and bring her back like that guy Orpheus tried to bring back Eurydice.