By Maz Evans
The Greek gods land in a modern English farm town, bumbling and broke, and a farm boy has to help them put death back in its box. It's very funny, with a real ache running underneath.
Elliot is quietly holding a lot together at home when a falling star turns out to be Virgo, a young immortal on an errand. She accidentally springs Thanatos, the Greek daemon of death, from the prison he's been locked in for centuries. Now it's on Elliot and a band of past-their-prime gods to catch death and shove him back in his box. Picture a vain Aphrodite and a Zeus who lives above a fish-and-chip shop, and you have the crew.
This is Percy Jackson's joke, the Greek gods as squabbling, washed-up celebrities loose in the modern world, at a gentler size. It's shorter, warmer, and stays in one English town instead of a monster-strewn trek across a continent. A child who loves the sound of Percy but stalls at four hundred pages gets the same gods and the same laughs in something they can actually finish. And Elliot himself is why they keep turning pages; you end up caring about him more than you expected to going in.