Rick Riordan · 2005 · road

Rick Riordan's 2005 novel, invented as bedtime stories for a son with dyslexia and ADHD. Percy Jackson is twelve, has been expelled from six schools, and discovers he is the son of Poseidon - and has ten days to cross America, retrieve Zeus's stolen master bolt from the Underworld, and stop a war among the gods.

1. 1
   Yancy Academy

   A boarding school for troubled kids in upstate New York, where a twelve-year-old is on his sixth school in six years - and where his Latin teacher is a centaur and his best friend a satyr, neither of which he has noticed.

2. 2
   The Metropolitan Museum

   On a field trip to the Greek and Roman galleries, Mrs Dodds takes him aside and turns into a Fury - and Mr Brunner throws him a pen that is a sword, and afterwards nobody remembers Mrs Dodds ever existing.

3. 3
   Montauk

   The cabin at the far end of Long Island where his mother has taken him every summer, and where she met his father - and where the Minotaur comes for them in a storm and she dissolves into gold light in its hands.

4. 4
   Camp Half-Blood

   Through the pine tree on the hill into a strawberry farm full of demigods, and Cabin Eleven, and capture the flag - and then Poseidon claims him, which makes him the one thing the camp did not want, a child of the Big Three.

5. 5
   Leeds Point

   Aunty Em's Garden Gnome Emporium on the New Jersey roadside: a statuary business run by a woman in a veil who is very keen on portraits - and Percy takes her head off with a sword while looking at her in a gazing ball.

6. 6
   The Gateway Arch

   Amtrak west to St Louis, where Annabeth wants to see the architecture - and Echidna and the Chimera meet them at the top of the observation deck, and Percy goes out of the Arch and into the Mississippi.

7. 7
   Denver

   Ares in a diner with sunglasses and a motorbike, who sends them to a disused water park to fetch a shield - and it is a trap set by Hephaestus for a live audience, which is what the gods do to each other for fun.

8. 8
   Las Vegas

   The Lotus Hotel and Casino, where the games never end and nobody notices the days - and they walk out to find five of them gone and a boy from 1977 still playing, with one day left to stop a war.

9. 9
   Santa Monica

   A cab across the desert to the Pacific, and Percy goes under the pier to meet a Nereid who gives him three pearls - one way out of the Underworld each, for a party that is going to be four people coming back.

10. 10
    Los Angeles

    DOA Recording Studios on the wrong side of downtown, where Charon takes the dead down in a lift - and Hades has neither the bolt nor the helm, and the thief turns out to have been in the party the whole time.

11. 11
    The Empire State Building

    Six hundredth floor, and Olympus moves with the centre of Western power the way it always has - a boy handing a lightning bolt back to Zeus, and the war stopped, and Kronos stirring in Tartarus for book two.