Percy Jackson and the Olympians
by Rick Riordan
Puffin, £12.99; 384pp
£11.69 (free p&p)
0870 1608080
www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

BRITISH CHILDREN suffer from a seemingly incurable yearning: at around 10, they all want to be at an American high school. Nor are they the only ones. Films such as Mean Girls, Ten Things I Hate About You, Clueless and Cruel Intentions have proved the high-school a Procrustean bed for literary classics such as The Taming of the Shrew, Emma and Les Liaisons Dangereuses.

Although I’m fed up with American authors now trying to muscle in on what has been, excuse me, a very British field of excellence (give or take the odd Sendak), it’s likely that the mystery writer Rick Riordan’s first children’s novel, Percy Jackson and the Olympians, will prove a huge hit for turning the high school into the stuff of myth.

Twelve-year-old Percy seems to be a boy heading for jail. He suffers from attention deficit disorder, he has dyslexia, he has been kicked out of six schools, his lovely mother is hooked up to a vile and violent stepfather, and although he goes to a private school for juvenile delinquents in upstate New York, his troubles have only just begun: for on a trip to a museum he vaporises his maths teacher.

Percy, you see, is Perseus, whose immortal father Poseidon has left him to find his own way out of the mess that being a demi-god attracts. Most half-bloods don’t live to be teenagers because the Titans send hit squads of Furies and other monsters to kill them. Percy’s maths teacher is one of them, and while he and his mother run for their lives, the Furies repeat their attacks while making it seem as if our hero has turned psycho.

He has to make it to Camp Half-Blood, where other demi-gods and goddesses have their own version of an American high school. Apart from having a satyr as his friend and a centaur as his teacher, it’s all very familiar, complete with rivalries, bitching, cheating and all the other features so familiar to us across the Atlantic. Where Disney’s cartoon Hercules satirised Hollywood’s cult of celebrity, Riordan’s version of the high-school genre becomes a really charming and funny thriller that will be especially appealing to boys.

If Diane Redmond’s Joshua Cross played with mythology at a deeper level, this works because of its cheeky wit. The immortals have moved Olympus from Greece to America because, as the centaur Chiron kindly explains, the gods move to wherever the flame is brightest. Having hovered over Rome, Germany, France, Spain and England, they are now with the United States: “Look at your symbol, the eagle of Zeus. Look at the statue of Prometheus in Rockefeller Center, the Greek façades of your government buildings in Washington.”

Sadly, instead of sending down a thunderbolt to wipe out President Bush before returning to England, the gods have their own problems. Percy may find that he can speak and read Ancient Greek, but he has the usual high-school problems in the shape of a pretty girl with a dangerous boyfriend. Also, you’ve guessed it, he has to save the world by returning the ultimate weapon of mass destruction — Zeus's thunderbolt — plus Hades’s helmet of invisibility. If not, then not only will he not get his mother back but it’s that good old end-of-the world scenario with an army out of Hades on the march.

There are plenty of bad jokes, such as “I felt as if I'd just come back from the dead — which I had,” which doesn’t stop the book from being almost as funny as Paul Shipton’s The Pig Scrolls. The Greek myths are the most robust we have, and laughing at their archetypes instead of allowing them to take their customary path to doom is one way of making sure that a new generation grows up to delight in them. Even if it does mean handing these immortal stories, like so many other classics, over to the American high-school for a makeover.

What’s more . . .

HELPING HERCULES by Francesca Simon (Orion) Sulky Susan’s magic drachma has her interfering in Greek myth. 6+

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