Look, I didn’t want to be a half-blood.

If you’re reading this because you think you might be one, my advice is: close this book right now.

Believe whatever lie your mom or dad told you about your birth, and try to lead a normal life.

Being a half-blood is dangerous. It’s scary. Most of the time, it gets you killed in painful, nasty

ways.

If you’re a normal kid, reading this because you think it’s fiction, great. Read on. I envy you for

being able to believe that none of this ever happened.

But if you recognize yourself in these pages—if you feel something stirring inside—stop reading

immediately. You might be one of us. And once you know that, it’s only a matter of time before they

sense it too, and they’ll come for you.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

My name is Percy Jackson.

I’m twelve years old. Until a few months ago, I was a boarding student at Yancy Academy, a private

school for troubled kids in upstate New York.

Am I a troubled kid?

Yeah. You could say that.

I could start at any point in my short miserable life to prove it, but things really started going bad

last May, when our sixth-grade class took a field trip to Manhattan— twenty-eight mental-case kids and

two teachers on a yellow school bus, heading to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to look at ancient

Greek and Roman stuff.

I know—it sounds like torture. Most Yancy field trips were.

But Mr. Brunner, our Latin teacher, was leading this trip, so I had hopes.

Mr. Brunner was this middle-aged guy in a motorized wheelchair. He had thinning hair and a scruffy

beard and a frayed tweed jacket, which always smelled like coffee. You wouldn’t think he’d be cool, but

he told stories and jokes and let us play games in class. He also had this awesome collection of Roman

armor and weapons, so he was the only teacher whose class didn’t put me to sleep.

I hoped the trip would be okay. At least, I hoped that for once I wouldn’t get in trouble.

Boy, was I wrong.

See, bad things happen to me on field trips. Like at my fifth-grade school, when we went to the

Saratoga battlefield, I had this accident with a Revolutionary War cannon. I wasn’t aiming for the

school bus, but of course I got expelled anyway. And before that, at my fourth-grade school, when we

took a behind-the-scenes tour of the Marine World shark pool, I sort of hit the wrong lever on the

catwalk and our class took an unplanned swim. And the time before that . . . Well, you get the idea.

This trip, I was determined to be good

The theif