Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Book One: The Lightning Thief

Twelve-year-old Percy Jackson finds out he's the son of Poseidon right around the time he gets blamed for stealing Zeus's lightning bolt, and the accusation launches him cross-country with two friends, Annabeth and Grover, running into monsters hiding in ordinary settings from New Jersey to Los Angeles. Rick Riordan wrote this one for readers 10 and up as the opener to a series that later became a #1 New York Times bestseller and a Disney+ show, and at 379 pages it moves fast enough that the length doesn't feel like a barrier for a reader that age.

The best trick in the book is turning the things that make school hard for Percy — the trouble at boarding school, the label of a kid who can't seem to behave — into something that makes sense once you find out he's secretly built for a very different kind of life; a line about ADHD possibly just being battle reflexes kicking in sums up the whole approach. The mythology is real Greek mythology, not invented lore, dropped into a contemporary road trip, so a kid gets genuine exposure to the gods and monsters underneath the jokes. This one's for a reader who wants a protagonist whose struggles at school get explained rather than dismissed, on the way to a much bigger adventure.