One last thing: we wouldn’t dream of completely depriving you of the Welcome to Camp Half-Blood movie experience. So we’ve included some choice excerpts from the film throughout the book—annotated by yours truly. Enjoy the show! (Cue maniacal laughter.)

SCENE: Darkness. Suddenly, a single spotlight illuminates Apollo standing on the front porch of the Big House. The house is a bold red color, a stark contrast to the short white chiton Apollo wears. He clears his throat and speaks.

APOLLO: A poem by Apollo, recited dramatically by…Apollo:

O, Immortal Chiron,

Centaur wise and true,

Trainer of our heroes,

Just remember who taught you.

—The opening scene of Welcome to Camp Half-Blood

I was just a young centaur, living alone in a cave on Mount Pelion, when I first met Lord Apollo. He literally dropped in out of the sky, which nearly gave me a heart attack. It wasn’t every day an A-list divinity with perfect teeth and glowing golden robes appeared on my hillside.

“You’re Kronos’s son, right?” Apollo pulled up a boulder and sat down. “My dad is Zeus! He’s Kronos’s son too. So I guess that makes you my uncle. How weird is that?”

“Ah…yes, Lord Apollo.” I tried to control the twitching in my withers. “Very weird indeed.” I noticed the sky was darkening even though it was only noon. “Not to be critical, O Great One, but shouldn’t you be driving the sun chariot right now?”

He shrugged. “Actually, I put it in park for a few minutes because Artemis is up there doing her lunar-eclipse thing.” He scratched his fashionably stubbled chin. “Or is it solar? I can never keep them straight.” Suddenly he jumped from his boulder as if he’d had a marvelous idea. “But that’s not important! I remember what I came down here to ask you. I’ve never ridden a centaur before. Mind taking me for a spin around the block?”

“Um…”

He put his fingers to his temples and intoned, “I predict you’re going to say yes.”

FYI, centaurs hate being taken for a ride, either literally or metaphorically. Nevertheless, I managed a forced smile. “I would be…delighted. Yes.”

“Oh, yeah!” Apollo crowed triumphantly. “Who has two thumbs and the gift of prophecy?” He jerked his thumbs at himself. “This god!”

As it turned out, giving Apollo a centaur-back ride was the smartest thing I ever did. Unlike others of my kind, I didn’t belong to a specific tribe. I was a loner…and, sometimes, lonely. We bonded during that ride. I found that Apollo could be quite charming one-on-one, when he wasn’t trying to impress his adoring throngs of fans. When we got back to the cave, he said something that changed my life.

“Uncle Chiron, I’ve decided to teach you some stuff.”

Perhaps he found the idea amusing: a nephew teaching his uncle. Or maybe, being the god of prophecy, he suspected I had an important role to play in the future of Olympus. Whatever the reason, he chose to share his knowledge with me.

At first, he showed me simple things, like how to nock an arrow—“Aim the pointy end away from your body”—and how to bandage a gushing battle wound. He taught me to make a lyre, play a number of hits like “Stairway to Olympus” and “Burnt-Offering Smoke on the Water,” and even compose my own lyrics. Once, in an effort to refine my poetry skills, he sent me on a quest to find a rhyme for arugula so that he could finish an ode to a mixed-green salad. The best I could do was pergola. Apollo called my effort an “ode fail”—the ancient precursor to today’s “epic fail”—but he continued to work with me.

The lessons went on for a year. Then one day, Apollo showed up at the doorway of my cave with a half-dozen young demigods. “You know all that stuff I taught you?” he asked me. “It’s time to pay it forward! I’d like you to meet Achilles, Aeneas, Jason, Atalanta, Asclepius, and Percy—”

“It’s Perseus, sir,” said one of the young men.

“Whatever!” Apollo grinned with delight. “Chiron, teach them everything I showed you. Y’all have fun!” Then he vanished.

I turned to the youngsters. They frowned at me. The one named Achilles drew his sword.

“Apollo expects us to learn from a centaur?” he demanded. “Centaurs are wild barbarians, worse than the Trojans!”

“Hey, shut up,” said Aeneas.

“Gentlemen and lady,” I interceded. “I assure you I am a different sort of centaur. Allow me to teach you, and I promise I will not make you participate in any crude centaur behavior like butting heads to the death or wearing drink helmets.”

Atalanta looked a little disappointed. “Butting heads to the death sounds fun…but I guess I can give your teachings a try.”

We got down to business.

First, I assessed their combat skills. Aeneas performed surprisingly well for a son of Aphrodite; I expected him to be a lover, not a fighter, and yet he actually knew how to use his sword as a sword rather than as a fashion accessory. The other demigods had some work to do. Atalanta seemed to think all training matches had to be fought to the death. She also referred to her classmates as dirty, stupid men, which made team-building difficult. Achilles spent his entire time in combat defending his right heel, an unusual maneuver that baffled me until I found out about his childhood dip in the River Styx. I tried to tell the boy to wear ironshod boots rather than sandals, but he simply wouldn’t listen. As for Asclepius, in one-on-one melees he had an off-putting habit of darting in and feeling his opponent’s forehead for signs of fever.

Next I tested my pupils for ingenuity. I handed out random materials and instructed them to improvise potentially lifesaving objects. “This ancient skill is known as MacGyvering,” I told them. Sadly, none of my inaugural group of students was a child of Hephaestus, so no one did very well with this assignment. When I hinted to Perseus that he could hammer and polish his Celestial bronze to make a mirrored shield, he rolled his eyes and scoffed, “What would I ever use that for?”

Likewise, most failed miserably with musical composition. Only Jason came up with something memorable: a mesmerizing stomp-stomp CLAP rhythm that so stirred the blood we adopted it as our prebattle beat. (You can still hear that stomp-stomp CLAP rhythm pounded out at athletic competitions today, along with the chant “We will, we will…ROCK YOU!”)

It was clear that the demigods had a lot to learn. But I didn’t mind. As we sang together by the campfire that first night, I felt as if I finally had a tribe of my own.

I taught the six demigods everything I knew. Then I sent them out into the world, where they fulfilled their destinies as heroes. Triple-threat Atalanta earned fame as a fleet-footed sprinter, a sure-shot huntress, and the only female Argonaut. Jason and his crew sailed into legend by securing the Golden Fleece and impressing the populace with myriad seafaring adventures. Achilles and Aeneas became mighty warriors—though, sadly, they fought on opposite sides in the Trojan War. (Spoiler alert: Achilles and Greece won, but Achilles was killed when he forgot to defend his heel.) Perseus discovered that a mirrored shield was useful after all when he faced a certain snake-headed gorgon, and as for Asclepius, he became the greatest medical mind in ancient history. Their heroic deeds live on in the memories of mortals to this day.