“The Lightning Thief” by Rick Riordan

As you can guess from my last post, the next installment in me rereading old books through my library is the Percy Jackson series. I loved these books when I was in high school, it’s a great combination of Ancient Greek myths and contemporary young adult fiction. Who didn’t have a myths phase in their life? This book allows you to imagine that you’re the child of a Greek god and have to train to fight monsters.

The most amazing thing about this book is how he updates the myths to fit modern life. The idea is that the Greek gods are real and they sometimes have children with mortals, leading to the existence of half-blood heroes. Riordan hypothesizes that any famous humans basically are all half-bloods utilizing their godlike powers. Which I find a little suspect, but that phenomenon isn’t unique to this series. I mean, can’t any normal humans do things? We aren’t all idiots. But anyways, that isn’t an important point.

Percy finds out that he is the son of the sea god, Poseidon, the first to be born in many years. Poseidon is one of the most powerful gods, meaning that Percy has a high affinity for monsters while in the mortal world. To complicate things, someone stole Zeus’ master lightning bolt and they are very eager to blame it on Percy. To clear his name, Percy goes on a quest to find the master bolt, all while still learning about himself and this new world that he has been thrown into.

If you grew up with Greek myths, then this book can be a really fun game of hide and seek to see what aspects of the myths you can find in the plots. There’s Medusa and Persephone and of course the heroes all come up like Hercules and Perseus. Riordan clearly loves the original myths, you can tell that thinking of clever ways to insert them was a lot of fun for him.

To be honest, it is hard to not judge this book based on what I know happens later on with the series and with Riordan’s other books. I think it is an excellent way to set the stage for everything that comes later though. On this reading, I picked up that when Percy asks Chiron about God (capital G God) Chiron’s response is along the lines of “we do not deal with the metaphysical here” to sort of sidestep that question. I just love this detail so much, that Riordan leaves room open for other religions and other gods to be out there. Because of course he is going to get into all of that later!

I’m excited to revisit the rest of the series, this was such a great intro and I’m sure that the rest holds up just as well.