Percy Jackson & the Olympians

Percy Jackson began as bedtime stories. Rick Riordan invented the character for his son Haley, who had been diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia — so Riordan made his demigod hero hyperactive and dyslexic too. At Haley's urging he turned the stories into a novel, road-tested the manuscript on a group of sixth-through-eighth graders (who helped choose the title and how Percy's sword works), and sold it in 2004 for enough money to quit his job and write full-time. The Lightning Thief arrived in 2005 and sold more than 1.2 million copies.

The premise clicked instantly with kids: the Greek gods are real, alive, and headquartered in 21st-century America; their half-mortal children train at Camp Half-Blood on Long Island; and Percy — son of Poseidon — must stop the Titan lord Kronos from destroying the world, with Athena's daughter Annabeth and the satyr Grover at his side. Four sequels landed annually like clockwork: The Sea of Monsters (2006), The Titan's Curse (2007), The Battle of the Labyrinth (2008), and The Last Olympian (2009). Reviewers reached for the obvious comparison — "look no further for the next Harry Potter," wrote Kirkus — and the sales eventually backed it up: more than 180 million copies worldwide by 2022, one of the best-selling book series of all time, with a run on the New York Times children's-series bestseller list measured in hundreds of weeks.

Hollywood took two swings and missed with fans — the 2010 film of The Lightning Thief was a commercial success but drew mixed reviews for straying from the book, and the 2013 sequel fared no better with critics — while the sequel series (The Heroes of Olympus, The Trials of Apollo) kept the world growing on the page. In 2023, a Disney+ adaptation finally arrived to positive reviews, delivering the faithful version an entire generation of former middle-schoolers had been waiting for since the Bush administration.