Sunday, February 19, 2012

The Lightning Thief review

The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan
Hyperion Books, 2005, 384 pages
How often have you been accused of something you didn’t do? Eating the last cookie, that smell in the elevator, stealing Zeus’s lightning bolt, that sort of thing? Well, twelve year old Percy Jackson has been accused of that last one, and in case you hadn’t already guessed, it’s a VERY bad thing to have a god mad at you.
The concept for this book comes from Riordan’s son Haley. He asked his dad to tell him the stories about the gods and heroes in Greek mythology. Riordan, who actually taught Greek myths, agreed to. After a while, he ran out of stories, much to his son’s disappointment. Then, the idea came to make up a new story with the same characters. Riordan soon came up with a story about a boy named Percy Jackson, who was on a quest across America to recover Zeus’s lightning bolt. It took three nights to tell, and at the end Haley told his dad he should write it up as a book. A year later the first Percy Jackson was written.
The story opens on a school field trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Percy gets attacked by his maths teacher Mrs. Dodds, who turned out to be one of the three furies. After turning her to dust, he asks about her with other students and Mr. Brunner (the Greek teacher who accompanied Mrs. Dodds on the field trip), but none of them knew who he was talking about. Everyone thought that he was referring to Mrs. Kerr, a teacher who suddenly appeared out of nowhere. Only Percy’s friend Grover seemed to have any indication of remembering her, though he tried to deny it.
After getting home for the year, his mother takes him on a vacation, away from Percy’s abusive step-dad Gabe. However, that night during a huge storm, Grover showed up and told them that something was after them. Percy, his mum and Grover then flee through the night, only to be caught by the Minotaur near their destination. Percy manages to defeat the beast, but not before it takes away his mother. Their destination was Camp Half-Blood, a summer camp for kids who were half-human and half-god. It’s there that Percy learns a lot about himself and the world around him: he is the son of a god (read the book to find out which one), Zeus’s lightning bolt is missing, and Zeus thinks he has it. When a hellhound attacks the camp, Percy is sent on a quest with Grover (who is actually a satyr) and Annabeth (a fellow camper and daughter of a goddess) to retrieve the lightning bolt and return it to Olympus within ten days.
A good, fast-paced, humorous read for young adults, though I do have some criticism. Despite being set entirely in America (and in a couple of places from Greek mythology), frequently there are uses of the metric system (why I picked up on that, I don’t know). Once your kids are done with Harry Potter, get them reading this.
My rating: 7/10

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