There is a particular kind of reading experience that belongs almost entirely to childhood, yet somehow refuses to stay there. I encountered Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief long after the years it was technically written for, and I still remember setting it down at two in the morning with that specific, slightly embarrassed exhilaration of having been completely caught. Rick Riordan’s original five-book series does something that most adult fiction does not dare attempt: it trusts the reader implicitly. It trusts a twelve-year-old to handle prophecy, mortality, parental abandonment, and the full weight of fate without softening any of it into mush. The humor is not decoration. It is the mechanism by which the darkness becomes bearable.
With sales exceeding 180 million copies worldwide, Percy Jackson is one of those franchises that has seeped so deeply into the cultural groundwater that its influence is almost invisible. You don’t see it directly anymore; you see it in the way contemporary middle-grade fiction handles mythology, in the way young protagonists are allowed to be flawed and funny rather than nobly solemn, in the way ancient worlds press against modern ones in book after book that followed in Riordan’s wake.
What I find most interesting, as someone who has spent years thinking carefully about what fiction does to the people who read it, is that the Percy Jackson formula is genuinely difficult to replicate. It is easy to import mythology. It is far harder to build the particular texture of wit and earnestness that makes Percy himself so compelling: the self-deprecating voice of a kid who has been told he is special but has every reason to doubt it, the loyalty that reads as instinct rather than virtue, the grief underneath the jokes. Books that merely dress themselves in Greek columns tend to feel hollow next to the original. The ones that succeed, the ones I recommend with genuine enthusiasm, understand that mythology is not the genre. It is the vehicle.
The list I have assembled here spans several years and several traditions. I have organized it not by age range or mythology of origin, but by what kind of reader you are, because I have come to believe that reading compatibility is a matter of temperament more than anything else. Some of us chase atmosphere. Some of us want unbreakable friendships and impossible odds. Some of us need the wit, or the world-building, or the particular bittersweet ache of a hero who did not ask for any of this. Whatever brought you to Percy Jackson, I think I know where to send you next.
For the Reader Who Wants Ancient Myth Reborn in the Present Tense
The specific pleasure Riordan perfected is the collision: a Greek god driving a taxi, a monster lurking in the school cafeteria, a prophecy delivered in a Long Island bunker. These books share that same delight in anachronism, treating mythology not as museum artifact but as living inconvenience.
The Kane Chronicles (The Red Pyramid) by Rick Riordan
Before dismissing this as the obvious recommendation, consider what Riordan actually does differently here. The Red Pyramid unfolds through alternating first-person narrations from Carter and Sadie Kane, a sibling pair divided by a transatlantic upbringing and reunited by catastrophe, and the tonal shift between their voices is genuinely accomplished. Carter is measured, encyclopedic, anxious. Sadie is caustic and impatient in ways Percy never quite was.
The Egyptian mythological system Riordan builds is also structurally more complex than the Olympian one. The concept of the ba and the ren, the soul divided into components, the idea that gods do not simply exist but must be hosted within human bodies, these elements give the magic a different philosophical weight. Where Greek myth in the Percy Jackson series reads as external adventure, Egyptian myth here becomes more intimate, a question of what inhabits a person from the inside. The Kane Chronicles has never received quite the cultural attention it deserved, perhaps because it arrived in Percy’s long shadow. Read it as its own accomplishment.
Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard (The Sword of Summer) by Rick Riordan
I want to make a specific claim about this series that I do not see made often enough: The Sword of Summer is funnier than anything else in the Riordanverse, and the humor earns its place in ways that reveal something true about Norse mythology’s own relationship to comedy.
Magnus Chase begins the book dead. He is a homeless teenager in Boston who dies in the first chapters and wakes up in Valhalla, which turns out to be a bureaucratic afterlife with a hotel aesthetic and complicated dietary restrictions. Riordan understood instinctively that Norse mythology, with its operatic doom and its fundamental acceptance that the gods will lose at Ragnarok, required a different kind of protagonist than Percy. Magnus is not fighting to prevent catastrophe; he is fighting while knowing catastrophe is scheduled. That changes the emotional register entirely. The series also features one of the most thoughtfully handled deaf characters in middle-grade fiction, Alex Fierro, whose identity is treated as simply part of who they are rather than as a narrative challenge to be overcome.
Aru Shah and the End of Time by Roshani Chokshi
The founding title of the Rick Riordan Presents imprint, Aru Shah introduced something the original Percy Jackson series could not quite offer: mythology from a living tradition, written by an author who grew up inside it. The Rick Riordan Presents imprint was launched in 2018 with this novel specifically to allow authors of color to tell stories drawn from their own cultures’ mythologies.
Roshani Chokshi is a prose stylist in a way that Riordan, for all his storytelling gifts, deliberately is not. There is a lushness to her descriptive passages, a willingness to slow down inside a sensory moment, that gives the Hindu mythological world of the Otherworld a texture Percy’s adventures occasionally lack. Aru herself is a compulsive liar, which is a more interesting flaw than most middle-grade protagonists are permitted, and the way her dishonesty becomes both obstacle and survival mechanism over the course of the series reveals real authorial intelligence. The emotional core, a lonely girl who has invented a life because the real one felt inadequate, lands with unexpected force.
For the Reader Who Needs the Wisecracking Underdog at the Center
Percy Jackson’s voice is his franchise. The plot could be substantially different and the books would survive on the narration alone. These books share that commitment to a protagonist whose humor is not separate from their pain but woven through it.
Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer
Colfer had the audacity to write a twelve-year-old criminal mastermind as his protagonist, and the gamble paid off magnificently. Artemis Fowl operates from a position of arrogance that Percy would never claim, yet the two characters share something structural: they are both outsiders navigating a world that was not designed for them, using assets the adults around them consistently underestimate.
The fairy world Colfer constructs beneath the earth, the LEP (Lower Elements Police), the technical vocabulary of a civilization that has been hiding from humanity for millennia, these elements have the same lived-in specificity that makes Camp Half-Blood feel real. But where Riordan’s comedy tends toward slapstick and self-deprecation, Colfer’s is dryer, more British in its irony. There is also a moral complexity to Artemis Fowl that is unusual for the genre: the boy is not a hero in any traditional sense, and the books never pretend otherwise. That ambiguity is part of what makes them rewatchable as you age.
Amari and the Night Brothers by B.B. Alston
Amari and the Night Brothers arrived in 2021 and immediately distinguished itself by taking the chosen-hero premise and filtering it through the experience of a Black girl in a world designed to make her feel unwelcome. The Bureau of Supernatural Affairs is not a welcoming institution for someone who looks like Amari Peters, and Alston does not soften that reality. The microaggressions are real, the disbelief from classmates is real, and the gap between Amari’s demonstrated ability and the credit she receives for it is real.
What keeps the book in conversation with Percy Jackson rather than simply adjacent to it is Alston’s wit, which has the same light, deflating quality as Riordan’s. The spy-agency framework, magic dossiers and field agents and supernatural bureaucracy, adds a procedural energy that feels fresh against the more classical quest structure of Percy’s adventures. The emotional stakes are also higher than they initially appear. Amari is searching for her missing brother at the same time she is trying to survive training, and the grief underneath the adventure never feels decorative.
Nevermoor: The Trials of Morrigan Crow by Jessica Townsend
Jessica Townsend published this debut novel in 2017 after years of rejection, which feels relevant because the book itself is about a girl who has been told her whole life that she is a catastrophe and a curse, before someone finally sees her clearly. Morrigan Crow is a condemned child who is rescued by a mysterious patron and brought to the city of Nevermoor, where she must compete in a series of trials to win a place in a secret society.
The comparison to Percy Jackson runs deeper than the chosen-child structure. Townsend shares Riordan’s gift for building world mythology that feels genuinely ancient and internally consistent, even when it is entirely invented. The Wundrous Arts that Morrigan eventually discovers she can perform have an operatic strangeness, a quality of being both magnificent and slightly wrong, that reminds me of the best moments in The Last Olympian. And like Percy, Morrigan is an excellent reactive protagonist: her charm is not in what she initiates but in how she responds to what the world throws at her, with a kind of wounded tenacity that earns every triumph.
For the Reader Who Wants Mythology Beyond the Mediterranean
One of the most meaningful developments in the decade since Percy Jackson’s peak cultural moment is the diversification of mythological source material in middle-grade fiction. These books draw from traditions that Western publishing historically overlooked, and they do so with authority.
Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky by Kwame Mbalia
This is one of the most important middle-grade debut novels of the past decade, and it does not receive nearly enough attention in the conversation about books like Percy Jackson. Kwame Mbalia, writing with the acknowledgment that John Legend served as a producer on the project, brings together African American folk mythology and West African mythological tradition in a way that feels genuinely original rather than assembled.
Tristan Strong is a boy grieving his best friend when he accidentally tears a hole in the sky and finds himself in Alke, a world where figures from African American folklore, Brer Rabbit, John Henry, Anansi the spider, exist alongside gods from West African tradition. What Mbalia does that is structurally brilliant is to treat the folk heroes as something distinct from the gods: people who were once human, who carry human grief and human limitation into their legendary status. That distinction carries the novel’s deepest thematic content. The grief Tristan carries is allowed to be central, not incidental, in a way that Percy’s losses sometimes are not.
Storm Runner by J.C. Cervantes
J.C. Cervantes, writing under the Rick Riordan Presents imprint, built a Mayan mythological world in The Storm Runner that has the density and internal logic of something lived-in rather than researched. Zane Obispo is a boy with a limp who lives near a dormant volcano in New Mexico, and the revelation that the volcano is not as dormant as it appears sets in motion an adventure rooted in the Popol Vuh, the Mayan creation narrative.
What distinguishes this novel from other myth-based middle-grade fiction is the weight it gives to physical difference. Zane’s limp is not metaphorical and not resolved. It is simply part of who he is, as Percy’s ADHD and dyslexia are part of Percy, but Cervantes handles it with a directness that I found more affecting than Riordan’s framing of neurodivergence as secretly a superpower. Zane’s difference is not reframed into advantage. He learns to work with it, which is a more honest story.
Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman
I include this with the acknowledgment that it is not middle-grade fiction and was never intended to be. But if you have a reader who finished Percy Jackson at twelve and is now sixteen or seventeen and wants something that shares its mythological playfulness while trusting them with adult complexity, Anansi Boys is the single most important recommendation I can make.
Gaiman’s novel follows Fat Charlie Nancy, who discovers after his father’s death that his father was Anansi, the West African spider god of stories. The book is a comedy of manners and a grief novel and a meditation on storytelling’s relationship to power, all at once. Gaiman shares with Riordan the conviction that mythology is not decorative, that the old stories press against contemporary life because they are about things that do not change. But his prose is richer and stranger, and the book earns comparisons to classic picaresque comedy in ways that are rare in any genre fiction.
For the Reader Who Craves World-Building With Interior Architecture
Percy Jackson’s greatest technical achievement is a world that feels both thoroughly mapped and inexhaustibly large. Camp Half-Blood, Olympus relocated to the six-hundredth floor of the Empire State Building, the Labyrinth that runs beneath America like a second nervous system: Riordan created geography. These books do the same.
Fablehaven by Brandon Mull
Brandon Mull’s Fablehaven is, in my reading, the most underrated series in American middle-grade fantasy of the past two decades. It has sold tens of millions of copies and is beloved by its readership, yet it rarely appears in critical conversations that treat the genre seriously. That omission strikes me as a mistake.
The premise, a nature preserve where magical creatures live in a carefully maintained ecosystem managed by a family of caretakers, is deceptively simple. What Mull develops from it is a system of rules and consequences for magic that has the rigor of physics. The sanctuary works because of specific agreements, binding oaths, territorial laws between species. When those laws are violated, the consequences are real and sometimes devastating. The two siblings at the center, Seth and Kendra Sorensen, represent genuinely different worldviews rather than simply different personalities. Seth’s recklessness and Kendra’s caution are not flaws to be corrected but orientations toward risk that the narrative tests repeatedly and honestly.
Keeper of the Lost Cities by Shannon Messenger
Shannon Messenger’s series is enormous, both in length (currently nine volumes and counting) and in the ambition of its world-building. Sophie Foster is a girl whose telepathic ability marks her as out of place among humans, and the discovery that she belongs to the world of the Elves, a civilization that predates humanity and has shaped it in ways humans do not know, propels a narrative whose geography keeps expanding.
I want to be precise about what Messenger does well here, because the series has a devoted readership that sometimes makes critics hesitant to examine it carefully. The political architecture she builds for Elvish society, factions, councils, ancient agreements, suppressed histories, is genuinely sophisticated. The emotional beats, particularly in the later books where Sophie must navigate institutional betrayal rather than simply individual villainy, have a complexity that Percy Jackson, aimed at a younger audience, never needed to reach. The romantic elements accumulate slowly enough to count as actual tension rather than YA formula. This is a series that rewards patience.
His Dark Materials (The Golden Compass) by Philip Pullman
No list of this kind is complete without this book, and no reading of it should be casual. Pullman wrote The Golden Compass as, among other things, a sustained argument against a certain kind of religious authority, but what makes it relevant here is not its ideology but its world-building methodology. The concept of the daemon, the external physical manifestation of a human soul that takes animal form, is one of the most brilliantly conceived elements in twentieth-century fantasy fiction.
Lyra Belacqua shares with Percy Jackson the quality of being an instinctive rather than a calculated hero. She lies fluidly and navigates social environments by reading them rather than by following rules. She is often wrong, sometimes catastrophically. Pullman trusts the wrongness as Percy Jackson trusts Percy’s failures: not as lessons to be learned but as the texture of being a person in a situation too large for any person. The tonal difference from Percy Jackson is significant, darker and more philosophically freighted, but the structural affinity is real.
For the Reader Who Wants Quest Fiction With Real Emotional Stakes
A quest is not interesting because of what the hero is looking for. It is interesting because of what finding it might cost. These books understand that the adventure is not the point.
The Alchemyst: The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel by Michael Scott
Michael Scott’s series, which ran from 2007 to 2012, made a specific choice that I think accounts for both its pleasures and its limitations: it embedded a fantasy adventure inside actual history. Nicholas Flamel was a real fourteenth-century French scribe long rumored to have discovered the philosopher’s stone, and Scott uses that documented biography as the spine of a mythology that eventually incorporates figures from virtually every world tradition.
The twins Josh and Sophie Newman are thrust into this history when they wander into Flamel’s San Francisco bookstore on the wrong afternoon. Scott’s technique of attaching invented adventures to historical or legendary figures has precedents, but the specificity with which he renders the historical personages, Machiavelli as a French secret service operative, John Dee as a villain with his own complex loyalties, gives the series an intellectual curiosity that most middle-grade quest fiction lacks. The research is worn lightly but it is real, and for young readers who find the history interesting, it provides a genuine entry point into actual scholarship.
The Wingfeather Saga (On the Edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness) by Andrew Peterson
Andrew Peterson is primarily known as a singer-songwriter, and The Wingfeather Saga carries the structural logic of an album: it builds, it repeats themes in variation, it earns its emotional resolutions through patient accumulation. The world of Aerwiar, occupied by the monstrous Fangs of Dang who serve the evil Gnag the Nameless, is darker than anything in Percy Jackson, and the Igiby siblings at the center are permitted to lose in ways that genuine adventure fiction sometimes flinches from.
What places this series in genuine conversation with Percy Jackson is the quality of the sibling relationship. Janner, Kalmar, and Leeli Igiby have the messy, specific, sometimes grudging love of actual brothers and sister rather than the idealized loyalty of fictional ones. Peterson does not smooth their friction into harmony; he shows how the friction itself becomes a kind of strength. The series was independently published for years before finding a mainstream audience, which may explain why it has taken time to receive the critical recognition it merits.
The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart
Trenton Lee Stewart published this novel in 2007 and it has been quietly beloved ever since, which seems to me entirely appropriate for a book about children who are brilliant but overlooked. Four children, selected through an elaborate series of tests by the enigmatic Mr. Benedict, are sent undercover into a school that is secretly transmitting subliminal messages designed to create widespread panic and government dependency.
The pleasure here is intellectual more than physical. Reynie Muldoon, the central protagonist, is not a fighter or a demigod; he is a child who thinks more carefully than the adults around him, and Stewart trusts that quality unreservedly. The team dynamic, each child contributing a different kind of intelligence, has a quality that Percy Jackson’s trio of Percy, Annabeth, and Grover also exploits: the sense that no single heroic quality is sufficient, that the quest requires a coalition. The mystery-thriller framework keeps the plot taut in ways that mythology-based adventure sometimes cannot, and the emotional stakes, particularly around Mr. Benedict’s narcolepsy and what it means to have a hero with a physical vulnerability, are handled with genuine care.
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
I include this book fully aware that it operates in a different register than everything else on this list. It is slim, allegorical, and makes no attempt at adventure-novel pacing. But I have recommended it to teenagers who finished Percy Jackson and wanted to understand what the quest is for, and it has never failed them.
Santiago, a shepherd boy, dreams of treasure and follows that dream across Spain and into Egypt, encountering figures and situations that are mythological in a non-specific, universalized sense. Coelho is interested in fate and personal legend in ways that illuminate what Riordan’s mythology is actually arguing: that the old stories persist because they are maps of internal territory. The book pairs extraordinarily well with Percy Jackson for a reader who is ready to ask what the adventures meant.
For the Reader Who Wants the Genre Pushed Into Something Stranger
Some readers finish Percy Jackson and want not more of the same but more of the feeling. The feeling is harder to define: the sense of ordinary life made suddenly permeable, of a world that was always larger than it appeared. These books arrive at that feeling by unexpected routes.
The Land of Stories (The Wishing Spell) by Chris Colfer
Chris Colfer, best known as an actor before this series, demonstrates in The Wishing Spell that his instincts as a storyteller are genuinely original. The premise, two twins fall into a magical book and find themselves navigating a world where fairy tale characters are real and living with the consequences of their canonical stories, has a meta-fictional dimension that most middle-grade adventure avoids.
What is interesting about the world Colfer builds is that it is not idealized. The fairy tale characters are aging, politically divided, carrying the weight of endings that did not leave them where they needed to be. Cinderella’s marriage has complications. Red Riding Hood has become a queen, and queenship suits her in unexpected ways. The refusal to sentimentalize the source material gives the series an edge that earns it a place in company with Percy Jackson’s own refusal to sentimentalize Greek mythology. The gods in Riordan’s series are not admirable; they are powerful and petty and often wrong. Colfer’s fairy tale figures are similarly complicated, and the book is richer for it.
The Girl Who Drank the Moon by Kelly Barnhill
Kelly Barnhill won the Newbery Medal for this novel in 2017, and the response from middle-grade readers has been consistent: it is too strange, or it is exactly strange enough. I belong to the second camp without hesitation. The Girl Who Drank the Moon operates on dream logic, a kind of narrative time that overlaps and circles rather than marching forward, and the result is a reading experience that demands a different kind of attention than quest-driven adventure fiction.
Barnhill’s prose is not trying to do what Riordan’s prose does. It is not quick or funny or deflating. It is incantatory, built from repetition and image and the rhythm of old stories. But the emotional architecture is the same: a child who contains more power than the world around her can accommodate, a question of whether that power is a gift or a burden, and a set of adults who have failed the child in ways they are slowly coming to understand. The book functions, at a deeper level, as a meditation on what Percy Jackson takes as its premise: that being chosen is not the same as being prepared, and that the people who most need saving are often the ones holding the most power.
A Final Word on the Riordan Problem
I want to close with something I think about often when recommending books like Percy Jackson, which is that the series created a set of expectations in its readers that are not entirely healthy for reading life. It trained an entire generation to want mythology delivered at a specific pace, with a specific ratio of humor to danger, with a specific kind of protagonist. That training is not wrong, but it can make readers impatient with books that do the same things more slowly or more obliquely.
The Percy Jackson series revitalized interest in Greek mythology and inspired a generation of readers to explore classical stories, and its impact extends well beyond the novels themselves. But the books that share its deepest DNA are often the ones that look least like it on the surface: Barnhill’s dreamlike prose, Gaiman’s adult comedy of manners, Pullman’s philosophical weight. The best books are never simply more of what you have already loved. They are the thing you did not know you were ready for.
Every title on this list offers something real. My strongest personal recommendations, the ones I would press into the hands of a reader I particularly respected, are Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky, Nevermoor: The Trials of Morrigan Crow, and His Dark Materials. Not because they are most like Percy Jackson, but because they are most likely to change the reader who encounters them. That is, in the end, the only metric that matters.