Pegasus Series

Kate O’Hearn

What’s It About?

Pegasus is a six-book series about a girl named Emily, her friends, and, of course, Pegasus. This series directly uses Roman mythology’s pantheon, but has a story all its own. Emily is a girl from New York City who lives alone with her father. Her mother died, but that’s not really an important part of the story. She meets Pegasus when he crashes out of the sky onto the roof of her penthouse. Her friends include Paelen, a thief from Olympus with the winged shoes of Mercury (also known as Hermes in the Greek myths), and Joel, an angry Italian orphan who loves Roman mythology. Together, these three, along with Pegasus and the occasional Olympian or human, save both Olympus and Earth. They fight evil Gorgons (snake women from Roman mythology), an evil government organization called the CRU (canonically, they’re the ones behind Area 51 which is both amazing and completely bonkers), and stop the destruction of the entire universe.

Why Do I Like These Books?

Honestly, these books’s aren’t that great. I have absolutely no reason to like them as much as I do. In my opinion, the series started off really well (the first book is by far my favorite to this day), but with each book got a little worse until you get to books five and six which I’m not a big fan off at all. The writing is also a little goofy, which is shown by the infamous line “‘It’s a trap!’ her father cried. ‘And we’re in it!’ Joel shouted.” which can be found on page 256 of the first book. I think I like these books because the story of these books is really interesting and it is about mythology, which is one of my favorite subjects. They did mess around with the traditional mythology quite a bit, but the author does it in such a good way that it doesn’t make the story that weird. There are many new worlds and species, a tweaked Titanology, and an interesting way of portraying these ancient characters.

When I first read these books, it wasn’t in a library or classroom and I just decided to purchase them for myself later on, like I do with most books. Instead, I went on a limb and purchased them without any knowledge of whether they were good or not. I bought the first three books (only the first three were out at that time) based only on the fact that a) Olympus was in the name so of course it had to do with Mythology, b) the covers were beautiful, and c) the author endorsement on the cover was from Rick Riordan so they had to be good.

In the end, I just genuinely enjoy the world that has been created by Kate O’Hearn and her characters are so much fun to watch as they go on adventures and save the world. Even though I’m not a huge fan of the last few books, I still love this series as a whole and reread the first few books from time to time.