Books I Didn't Finish: Percy Jackson And The Lightning Thief

Recently, or possibly a year ago (my grasp of time isn’t great these days), I saw people on twitter lamenting that they could no longer read Harry Potter due to JK Rowling’s controversial stance in the Gender Wars™. Lots of Twitter commentors were recommending Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series as a replacement, which got me thinking that I’ve never actually read any of those books. By the time they started coming out I had moved on from middle-grade fiction, save for some old favourites, and they were off my radar.

Also, they’re about Greek gods swanning around in modern-day America, and as I mentioned once or twice in my recent book preview post, that’s not my jam.

But now I’m a big cool adult, so I can read whatever I want without feeling self-conscious about it! Plus, there’s an Apple TV+ series coming next year, which means that we might soon be in the midst of full-on Percymania. Can you really afford not to be part of that cultural zeitgeist? I’m performing a public service here, if you think about it.

Anyway, I only got about halfway through it.

The plot: there’s a boy named Percy Jackson who’s actually a demigod, the son of a mortal woman and Poseidon (this is technically a spoiler, but it’s really obvious so whatever). Kids like him tend not to survive past the age of twelve because they attract monsters and other nefarious sorts, so Percy is sent off to a summer camp for demigods where he can learn how to sword-fight and not die. But once there it turns out there’s trouble afoot with the gods–someone has stolen Zeus’ lightning bolt, he thinks it was Poseidon, if it isn’t returned in ten days then there’ll be a war among the Olympian pantheon, and Percy might get turned into a seal by Dionysus. Frankly that sounds like an improvement to me, but I guess he’s not down for it so it’s quest time.

The Percy Jackson series is usually described as Harry Potter, but with demigods instead of wizards and a demigod summer camp instead of wizard school. That’s not inaccurate, but at the same time the actual plot is quite different–the book only spends a few chapters in Magic Boy Summer Camp for instance, rather than the bulk of the story taking place there like in six out of seven Harry Potter books. I don’t get the sense that Camp Half-Blood is meant to be a central component of this world the way Hogwarts is; instead the characters spend a lot of time either bouncing around urban fantasy-esque enclaves nestled in among the mundane world or venturing into supernatural realms like the underworld.

One way that this definitely differs from Harry Potter is that it’s written by an American author, and it shares a quality I’ve noticed with a lot of American middle grade novels, which is that it’s written in HYPER-FAST ACTION MODE. Chapter one here we go, PERCY IS FIGHTING A HARPY okay we’re onto the next chapter EXPOSITION TIME, FIVE PLOT THREADS ARE LAUNCHING AT THE SAME TIME GO GO GO.

The book has a lot of story setup to get through, and it plows through it at absolute top speed. Half the conversations the characters have in the first third of the story are just breakneck exposition dumps setting up the world, character backgrounds, backstory necessary for the plot, and dialogue establishing plot hints that will be played off later, sometimes all at the same time.

This both makes for an uncomfortably breakneck pace, as well as leading to a lot of conversations that go on for way too long so that all the necessary information can fit in–which then causes problems down the line because it means the pace of the rest of the story has to speed up even more to make up for lost time. There’s a fight against a Medusa at one point that has a really tense set-up—the kids can’t look at her or they might get turned to stone!—but then the fight ends with Percy cutting her head off in a single sword swing instead of finding some clever way to defeat her, which partially feels like a consequence of the rushed pacing.

I feel like a lot of this could have been remedied by cutting the Camp Half-Blood stuff and leaving it for the next book. Percy only spends a few chapters there before he’s off on his quest, but introducing the location and the multiple new characters present there takes up a lot of space for not much pay-off. It doesn’t help that the camp just isn’t all that interesting, especially compared to a certain magical castle that you can’t really help but compare it to. I guess it’s kind of cool that the different cabins are themed after different gods, but, like…it’s a summer camp. The central administration building is just a house. The showers are just showers. Wheee.

Oh speaking of the camp, quick tangent: the kids and staff are served by forest and water nymphs or something, which are all described as looking like children. Percy doesn’t seem to find the idea of child servants at all noteworthy, nor does anyone else comment on it, so I guess if there’s one area of definite overlap between this and Harry Potter, it’s the uncomfortable slavery stuff.

…Okay, I’m being an asshole here, there’s no sign the nymphs are literal indentured servants or anything and I’m willing to bet this gets at least touched on later. There are some other aspects of the book that I found more concretely iffy, though, and here I don’t mean that I’m trying to cancel Percy Jackson for being Literal Fascism or anything, I just mean that if the book was being written today these elements probably wouldn’t be in it.

Percy and the other demigods frequently get diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia, which Percy finds out is actually because his brain is wired to understand ancient Greek instead of English and his “battle senses” are messing up his sensory processing. Not really going to comment on this too hard because I don’t have ADHD or dyslexia, I just thought it was kind of awkward. Maybe people with those conditions find this cool, let me know in the comments.

One thing I can comment on, and didn’t really like at all, is the fact that the various supernatural beings like satyrs that exist in this universe disguise their inhuman traits in the normie world by making them look like disabilities–so Percy’s friend hides his goat legs with prosthetics and crutches to explain his odd gait, and Percy’s teacher who’s actually a centaur hides his horse body in a wheelchair (in a way that doesn’t really seem like it would work, but whatever).

This doesn’t seem entirely necessary—there’s already this concept of “Mist” that partially prevents mortals from perceiving supernatural stuff—but even apart from that…I’m just inherently uncomfortable with stories where it turns out that disabled people are faking it, even if it’s not for any sinister reason. That idea is so common in media (and, you know, real life) that even comedic, non-offensive uses of the trope like we see here rub me the wrong way.

Again: I’m not accusing Rick Riordan of Literal Ableism here, I just didn’t like a thing in a book, leave me alone

Oh and there’s also this, from a kind of unnecessary bit where Percy’s horse teacher explains why the Greek gods are in America now:

“‘Well, certainly. The gods move with the heart of the West.’

‘The what?’

‘Come now, Percy. What you call “Western civilization”. Do you think it’s just an abstract concept? No, it’s a living force. A collective consciousness that has burned bright for thousands of years. The gods are part of it. You might even say they are the source of it, or at least, they are tied so tightly to it that they couldn’t possibly fade, not unless all of Western civilization were obliterated. The fire started in Greece. Then, as you well know – or as I hope you know, since you passed my course – the heart of the fire moved to Rome, and so did the gods. Oh, different names, perhaps – Jupiter for Zeus, Venus for Aphrodite, and so on – but the same forces, the same gods.’

‘And then they died.’

‘Died? No. Did the West die? The gods simply moved, to Germany, to France, to Spain, for a while. Wherever the flame was brightest, the gods were there. They spent several centuries in England.
”

I’m not going to say this would have been completely toothless when the book first came out—2005 was right at the height of America’s occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq—but wow I’ve seen a lot of people with Greek statue avatars saying shit like this on Twitter over the last few years, to the point where people collectively categorizing a huge swathe of majority-white countries into “The West” immediately gets my hackles up, especially if they’re talking about this nebulous construct in purely heroic or positive ways.

(In case you’re wondering, I don’t know if other mythologies are also present in the Perco Jackson universe, but Riordan is involved in some way in the “Rick Riordan Presents'' publishing imprint which is basically “what if Percy Jackson but written by and about people who aren’t white.” I’ve actually heard good things about some of those books, so maybe I’ll check one of them out for the blog).

Anyway that tangent where I revealed how Rick Riordan committed Literal Murder got kind of long, so let’s wrap this up.

Percy Jackson And The Lightining Guy obviously has to be compared to Harry Potter And The Philosophr’s Thing. I have in the past stated that I actually feel the first three Harry Potter books are legitimately good children’s novels—it’s only really in book four that JK Rowling started getting immunity from the editors—so for me, “as good as the first Harry Potter book” isn’t the extremely low bar that it might be for some of you.

Does Percy Jackson clear that bar?

Nope.

Next time on Ronan Blogs Books For Children, I’ll rank every meal described in the Redwall series based on how much I want to eat them.

(I’m not actually doing that. Not unless someone pays me to).