Booklog: Percy Jackson and the Olympians 1-3 (Riordan)

The Lightning Thief (Rick Riordan)

Percy Jackson thought he had problems -- ADHD, dyslexia, an abusive stepfather, and an instinct for trouble that's gotten him kicked out of one school after another -- but that was before his math teacher tried to kill him, he lost his mother in a minotaur attack, and he learned that his father was Poseidon, god of the sea. The Olympians are still thriving in updated forms in twenty-first-century America, now the heart of the West. But dark forces are stirring, threatening Percy with monsters by day and evil dreams by night. Worse yet, someone has decided to frame Poseidon for the theft of Zeus's lightning bolt, and unless Percy can recover it, war in heaven will destroy the earth. Now he knows he's got problems ... and his chronicler Rick Riordan has the Midas touch. He updates the Greek myths without losing their archetypal flavor; he maneuvers between verbal registers with ease, so that both Percy's irreverent narration and the terrible formality of the gods revealed sound natural; and he provides his eminently likeable characters with a rip-roaring series of adventures for the reader to root them through. Percy occasionally sounds a bit old for his years and some of the minor human characters (particularly his mother and stepfather) are inconsistently or flatly characterized, but these are quibbles. Hey, the man uses "hither" correctly -- what's not to love? First in a series of five books with an overarching plot and a defined end point; the next two installments, The Sea of Monsters and The Titan's Curse show improvement on the characterization front, as Riordan learns to better balance comic grotesquerie and emotional seriousness. I can't wait to see how it all turns out. Recommended for classicists with a sense of humor.