Not to cause panic, but you may need to sit down for this news: a new Percy Jackson book is in the works, which will be the first full novel of Percy’s POV since 2009’s The Last Olympian. Crying, screaming, throwing up.
Rick Riordan, iconic creator of the Percy Jackson universe and unproblematic fave, announced the news on his official website.
“Back in 2019, when we were beginning to explore the idea of a new Percy Jackson adaption, I pitched an idea to Disney that I hoped might convince them to move things along,” he revealed in a blog post.
“If they’d help me get a live-action series off the ground, I would be willing to write a new Percy Jackson novel, or even several, which Disney Publishing could release when the show came out.”
SEVERAL?!
“As you probably know, I have continued to write about Percy’s world in many different books, from many different points of view, but I have not done a first-person, Percy Jackson POV full-length novel since The Last Olympian in 2009, and I haven’t done a novel centering on our classic trio, Percy, Annabeth and Grover, since The Lightning Thief in 2005,” he continued.
“As you might imagine, this is the main request I get from readers: a sort of ‘Percy Jackson 6‘.
“For years, I resisted doing this because I was having too much fun writing from other points of view, expanding Percy’s world through other characters. Over a decade later, however, I figured such a book would not only be fun to write once again — it would promote the show and vice versa. Everybody would win!”
Riordan said he sketched out a bunch of plot lines which would be set in Percy Jackson’s final year of high school — which is just before the Trials of Apollo books if you’re a huge fan like me — but turns out he didn’t need them.
Disney Publishing ended up approaching him unprompted because of the renewed interest in the Percy Jackson universe given the live action reboot and voilà, an opportunity for a new book was born!
“I didn’t want to publish something just to publish something,” Riordan wrote.
“I wanted it to be a book you all might actually love, a kind of ‘thank you’ for sticking with me all these years as you waited for a better PJO adaptation. And so I said, ‘You know what, I happen to have an outline for a new Percy book. It’s called The Chalice of the Gods’.”
Guess what demigods: we have a plot synopsis too because Rick Riordan fkn DELIVERS:
The novel unfolds during Percy’s senior year at Alternative High School in New York — after the action of The Heroes of Olympus, but before The Trials of Apollo. This time around, Percy is not worried about saving the world. He has a much harder quest: getting into college. New Rome University requires recommendation letters from three gods, which means . . . yep, you guessed it. Percy has to run quests to get the letters. (That sound you hear is Percy screaming into his pillow in frustration.)
First quest: the cupbearer of the gods, Ganymede, is missing his chalice. Not only is this embarrassing. It’s also a potential disaster, since any mortal who happens to drink from the cup will gain immortality. Percy, Annabeth and Grover have to find that chalice and return it to Ganymede before anyone realizes he lost it. These gods . . . they really need GPS tags on their magic items, don’t they?
Brb, re-reading all the Percy Jackson books for the eleventh time because it is officially 2009 again.
