Each student will need a copy of Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Last Olympian by Rick Riordan.

As a whole, the gods have little involvement in the day-to-day lives of their demi-god children. They will appear or provide power to the kids on rare occasions often when they need human assistance to accomplish a personal goal. Many of the demi-gods resent their illusive parents. When Kronos, father of the Olympian gods and goddesses, wages a vengeful war against his children, he uses the demi-gods’ bitterness to draw many to his side of the battle. Rather than accept immortality from the gods for his heroic deeds in the war, Percy makes the Olympian leaders promise to claim and pay attention to their half-blood children. He believes better parent-child relationships will keep future disagreements from escalating into war. ico can see the auras of people who are about to die. He suggests that if Grover died, the satyr would reincarnate into something in nature. Percy has a magical empathy link with Grover that sometimes allows him to hear or locate his friend or to know what the satyr is feeling. Action-packed battles and swordplay are common in this story. The fact that monsters dissolve rather than die significantly reduces the images of bloodshed. Many of the teenage heroes are injured, and a few are killed. Thalia, a huntress, wears a “Death to Barbie” shirt depicting a Barbie doll with an arrow through its head. Hades, Lord of the Dead, wears a cloak displaying “the terrified faces of the damned” and rides in a chariot decorated with scenes of painful deaths. When he and Nico join the Olympians in battle, they bring along an army of skeletal, undead soldiers who claw their way out of the Underworld.