Corydon and the Island of the Monsters

by Tobias Druitt

Aw, I hate to give a bad review, but the only reason I finished this book is that it is very short. I kind of had to force myself to read it.

It's about a deformed Greek boy who turns out to have an immortal father, gets driven out of town into the wilderness, where he hooks up with a bunch of mythological creatures, travels to the underworld, and defeats a bunch of idiotic guys who are trying to become heroes by slaying the so-called monsters, who actually show more humanity to Corydon than any of the actual humans in the book — so I thought it would appeal to the eight-grade mythology geek still trapped somewhere inside me, but somehow it didn't. It just came off as sort of dumb, excepting a few clever revisions to the familiar tales of Greek mythology and the fact that the story pits the Chthonic gods against the Olympian gods.

There will be at least two sequels; I will not read them. Maybe someone who's even more into mythology than me (and still in eighth grade) will enjoy them.