Twelve-year-old Meg McCaffrey is a cartwheeling ball of energy contained within a pudgy, pint-size frame. When Lester Papadopolous, a.k.a. Apollo, first meets her, she’s wearing a riotous and dirt-stained outfit of red sneakers and yellow tights topped with a green tank-top dress and a pair of cat-eye glasses studded with rhinestones. Her tangled dark hair is chopped in an uneven pageboy. Later, after Percy Jackson’s mother Sally scrubs her clean and loans her black leggings and a more stylish green dress, Meg is revealed to be a surprisingly pretty girl.

Meg is blunt and bossy to the point of rudeness. She is a ferocious fighter who will use any weapon at her disposal—a bag of garbage, a piece of rotten fruit, a well-aimed kick—to defend herself or deliver a blow. But she is especially dangerous when she transforms her twin sickle-shaped Imperial gold rings into deadly siccae blades. As a daughter of Demeter, goddess of agriculture, Meg has the power to control plant life. She can thwart attacks by causing vines to trip, wrap, and imprison her enemies or growing impenetrable walls of greenery to stop them in their tracks. And somehow, she summoned a karpos, or grain spirit, made entirely of peaches. She named the spirit Peaches, and when she needs him for extra protection, he’s there.

Meg herself often appears to be an impenetrable wall, impossible to break into. But there is a chink in her exterior, and one horrible man—the Beast—knows just how to worm his way inside. . . .