"Percy Jackson and The Lightning Thief by Rick Riodan

I read young adult books fairly often because they are often better than those written for adults for several reasons. The authors that write them feel less obligation to prove how smart they are, so use the correct words rather than the impressive ones and tell stories in the best way rather than showing off that they can write non-linier stories. Also, a good young adult writer understands the value of a book isn’t in being entirely original and feel safe to write something less unique since their audience is unlikely to have read everything in the genre already. Finally, they get sidetracked less by understanding readers don’t want page long descriptions or completely pointless “romance” scenes or descriptions of grand meals but want to get to the point. But while they do have advantages, they have weaknesses as well and “Percy Jackson: The Lightning Thief” by Rick Riordan has those too.

What happens in “Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief” by Rick Riordan

Percy Jackson is a twelve-year-old boy with both ADHD and dyslexia and has gotten in trouble many times having to change schools several times in a few years. He begins the story at an expensive boarding school. During a field trip, he is attacked by one of his teachers who turns into a strange old hag like creature. There is no evidence and no one else remembers the teacher, so he is able to almost convince himself it didn’t happen until he overhears his best friend, Grover, and his favorite teacher discussing him just before the end of the school year.

He takes the bus home with Grover and after some argument leaves his friend behind. Once home his mother is going to take him on a trip, but things go wrong and she instead takes him to a camp that his father wanted him to attend. On the way, they are attacked by a Minotaur which Percy kills. He then walks into camp half-blood. Which turns out to be a camp for the mortal children of Olympian Gods.

He has a small amount of training here and discovers that he is the son of Poseidon. He gets to know people but is almost immediately sent on a quest. Most of the quest simply involves him trying to get from the East Coast to the West Coast since as the son of Poseidon he can’t fly. No explanation is given of why he can’t take a boat, though it may be an issue of speed. Once there, he will need to enter the underworld to get Zeus’s thunderbolt from Hades, though Percy has been accused of stealing it.

They travel across the country running into the monsters of Greek Myth, including the Medusa and the Furies. He eventually reaches California where his father gives him, indirectly, three deus ex machina pearls. He then sneaks into the underworld where they get to Hades easily because he let them. Hades accuses Percy of stealing his helmet and Zeus’s lightning bolt. Hades searches his backpack and discovers Zeus’s lightning bolt. This is enough to convince Percy that it wasn’t Hades who stole anything.

With that and some dreams that he has been having, Percy figures out that he was being set up the entire time to start a war and it’s the obvious suspect who would want to start a war Ares. Percy fights Ares and gets Hades’ helmet from him and returns it to the god of the underworld. He then goes to Olympus and returns the lightning bolt. Once there, he warns them that Ares wasn’t the one behind the plan and that it was actually Kronos, but Zeus isn’t willing to consider that Kronos might actually return.

What I liked about “Percy Jackson and The Lightning Thief”

This story doesn’t waste any time. It has the character fight things from practically the first page. Beyond that, Rick Riordan does a pretty good job of creating characters. Giving Percy Jackson both dyslexia and ADHD makes him someone that I think a lot of kids could relate to, and having your main character have real weaknesses is always a good way to make them interesting. Beyond that the personalities of the characters are largely based on their Olympian parents, which makes it easy to create characters who are stereotypical without them feeling overly so, which makes even the side characters easy to understand quickly.

What I liked Less about “Percy Jackson: The Lightning Thief”

There are some hints here and there to things changing in the last few thousand years for the gods, but largely all the Olympian monsters, powers and gods are the same ones that existed then. Some of this makes some amount of sense in the story as monsters which are killed will return, but having only the original Greek gods with no new ones felt a bit off in a book that points out that the gods had tons of children.

Beyond that, while I liked the story didn’t waste time, it felt rushed from time to time. The biggest point of that is at Camp Half-blood. Percy arrives and gets two weeks’ worth of training before he goes on a quest to the underworld and ultimately fights the god of war. It makes what the character feels less impressive. In fact, the only time that Percy is forced to struggle with things is early in the story before he discovers his heritage. After that there are dangers, but he mostly overcomes them easily.

Conclusion

I enjoyed Percy Jackson and The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan. It was a fun story and I can understand why it might connect with kids who also love Harry Potter since it has a lot of similarities. That said, the book skews young for me and while at the top of this I pointed out those advantages some negatives of this book are for the same reason. That is why ultimately I would have to say that for kids of the right age it could be brilliant, but for me it was simply a fun few hours.