Your child has heard all about Percy Jackson from older children and desperately wants in — but four hundred pages of monsters is a lot to hand a younger reader, and the scary parts can be a lot too. This trail walks them up to it gently, and here's the trick: every book on the way is easier than Percy, never harder. A short, silly taste of the Greek gods, then the whole Percy story told in comic panels, then one warm, funny myth novel that's a real book but a lighter one — and then the Lightning Thief itself, which by now reads like a book they've been waiting for instead of one they're bracing against.
This is a run-up to one specific book, built for the child who wants Percy Jackson but isn't quite up for four hundred pages of it yet. It doesn't try to toughen them with harder and harder books — every step stays easier than the Lightning Thief, so the novel is the biggest thing they read, not the second-biggest. Heroes in Training gives them the Greek gods as short, cartoon fun. The graphic-novel Lightning Thief hands them the actual Percy story in pictures, so the characters and the plot are already old friends by the time they meet the real book. Who Let the Gods Out? is their first proper Greek-myth novel, funny in exactly the Percy way but shorter and warmer. And then the Lightning Thief, which now feels like arriving somewhere they already know. If your child is hungry for the myths themselves, keep Percy Jackson's Greek Gods nearby as a god-a-night book to dip into alongside any of these — it's a companion to browse, not a step to climb.