{"id":739,"date":"2012-01-23T22:46:33","date_gmt":"2012-01-23T22:46:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog-test\/?p=739"},"modified":"2012-01-23T22:46:33","modified_gmt":"2012-01-23T22:46:33","slug":"riordan_jackson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/2012\/01\/riordan_jackson\/","title":{"rendered":"Riordan, Rick: Percy Jackson & the Olympians series"},"content":{"rendered":"

Word of mouth is terrific, because I would never otherwise have picked up Rick Riordan’s series Percy Jackson & the Olympians<\/strong>. These are apparently middle-grade books, but are very readable by adults. [*] The premise is that the Greek gods are real, are still around, and have a bunch of kids by mortals, who tend to attract attention of monsters as they get older so are brought to Camp Half-Blood to learn survival skills. Plus the gods get along as well as they ever did, and (of course) there’s a prophecy.<\/p>\n

[*] I gather that, marketing-wise, Harry Potter is also middle-grade, and in some ways it’s an inevitable comparison. Both series start fairly light and get quite dark by the end, and both have one-book-per-year structure. However, the Percy Jackson books focus on the summers, not the school years, which makes them a lot tighter; the third also departs from the pattern by taking place in December. <\/p>\n

I was warned that the first book, The Lightning Thief<\/cite>, is somewhat weak, which it is, suffering from too-obvious threats and a bit of a tone mismatch, especially at the end. But I could see the seeds of what people recommended it for, the humor (the first chapter is titled “I Accidentally Vaporize My Pre-Algebra Teacher”) and the strong female characters and the start of a clear theme that, for lack of a better way to summarize it, I will call a deliberate rejection of the lone male action hero paradigm. And it was a very fast read and I’d gotten them all from the library, so I kept going.<\/p>\n

Things get more complicated with the second, The Sea of Monsters<\/cite>, and the stakes rise with the third, The Titan’s Curse<\/cite>. By the fourth, The Battle of the Labryinth<\/cite>, I’d progressed to “wow, that was good!” in my sketchy notes to myself. I think that one may be my favorite, though the final book (The Last Olympian<\/cite>) is thoroughly satisfying on the whiz-bang and thematic levels.<\/p>\n

The books do require a reader be able to roll with the idea that the Greek gods are key to Western civilization and that as a result, the destruction of Mount Olympus (now atop the Empire State Building) is a genuine threat to said civilization. I mean, yes, it does at least limit it to Western, but it’s the kind of thing best not examined too closely—if one can, and if one can’t, that’s perfectly understandable.<\/p>\n

With that caveat, however, I had a ton of fun reading these, I suspect they may become comfort reading for me, and I look forward to SteelyKid and the Pip being old enough to read them (which will make three generations of our family to enjoy them; Chad & I gave the set to his dad this Christmas and he just finished the last, which is a near-record pace for him.) If this is the kind of thing that might appeal to you, don’t let the bookstore location or the apparently-dreadful movie adaptation of the first put you off.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Word of mouth is terrific, because I would never otherwise have picked up Rick Riordan’s series Percy Jackson & the Olympians. These are apparently middle-grade books, but are very readable by adults. [*] The premise is that the Greek gods are real, are still around, and have a bunch of kids by mortals, who tend … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Riordan, Rick: Percy Jackson & the Olympians series”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,15],"tags":[359],"class_list":["post-739","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-sf-and-fantasy","tag-riordan-rick"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/739","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=739"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/739\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=739"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=739"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=739"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}