By Joan Holub, Suzanne Williams
The gentlest possible first taste of Greek mythology: a ten-year-old boy gets zapped by a lightning bolt, learns he's the young god Zeus, and has to dodge the Titans with a magic dagger that turns into a thunderbolt.
Zeus thinks he's an ordinary ten-year-old until a lightning bolt scoops him up and drops him into a very strange life. It turns out he's an Olympian, one of a scattered group of god-children the Titan king Cronus has been rounding up. Zeus is handed a magical dagger named Bolt that grows into a full-size thunderbolt when he needs it, and with a couple of new friends he sets off to stay one jump ahead of the Titans. The chapters are short, the pictures are everywhere, and the jokes come fast.
This is the softest on-ramp to the whole world of Greek myth, built for a child who isn't ready for Percy Jackson yet but is dazzled by gods and lightning. The names are the same ones they'll meet later, Zeus, Cronus, the Titans, but the danger is cartoon-light and every chapter is a quick win. For a child just getting comfortable with chapter books, the short length and wall-to-wall pictures do a lot of the work. And there are many more books in the series, so a child who takes to it has a long, easy runway before the bigger books.