Summer Reading and The Throne of Fire

WOO-HOO!!!! School is OUT!! Isn't that a great sentence? School is out and summer's HERE! What a great time of year--long, lazy days with no homework, lots of trips to the pool, time to hang with your friends, etc. etc. And, of course, time to READ!! Now sometimes, with all the fun stuff going on during the summer, reading can get sent to your brain's back seat. That's why the library offers a Summer Reading Program every year. We try to encourage guys to read by offering prizes for reading! You can get prizes for 10 hours and 20 hours of reading. It doesn't matter what you read--chapter books, magazines, graphic novels, biographies, nonfiction, whatever. The Summer Reading Program starts tomorrow, so go to any branch of the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library and pick up your reading record, which marks the number of hours you read. If you can't make it tomorrow, don't worry--Summer Reading goes from June 15 to August 10, so you have plenty of time. Got any more questions? Click here to find out.

And if you're looking for a good read to kick start your summer, you couldn't do better than The Throne of Fire by Rick Riordan. It's the second book in the Kane Chronicles series. In the first book, Charles and Sadie Kane find out that their father was not only a famous Egyptologist but also a powerful magician who accidentally released the ancient Egyptian gods into the modern world. In this book, Apophis, the Serpent of Chaos, is about to break out of his ancient prison. If that happens, he'll devour the sun and end the world. Carter and Sadie race against time to awaken Ra, the chief Egyptian deity and the only one strong enough to oppose Apophis. But Ra has been asleep for thousands of years; if they do awaken him, will they get anything other than a doddering old man?

Rick Riordan has written another winner in this book. It's got everything you'd expect from the great Mr. Riordan--fantastic adventures, battles with monsters in the middle of big cities, secrets that get revealed slowly throughout the story, and humor that will make you laugh out loud over and over again. Along the way you get Carter and Sadie trapped in underground tombs by a zombie army, the two kids chased by a vulture goddess, and help from a very ugly dwarf in a Speedo! Laughs and action. What more could a guy want? If you've never read one of Mr. Riordan's books, you could start with this one and not miss anything--but I'd recommend you start with The Red Pyramid first. Or, better yet, get them both and read one after the other. You've got time--it's summer!