The Last Olympian

I've had my eye on you for awhile Percy Jackson, whenever a series of books, especially in young adult, becomes a phenomenon I make a note to try and read it at some point.

And there is a lot about the Percy Jackson series to like: the adventure, the jokes, the wish-fulfillment aspect of having a secret mom or dad who was actually one of the Greek gods making you a half-blood and eligible for training at, wait for it, Camp Half-Blood. Hogwarts it ain't, but I'll get to that later.

The premise here is that the Greek gods go whereever the heart of Western Civilization is, from Greece to Rome to France to Britain, a German state at some pre-Kaiser Wilhelm period and finally to the United States. The gods are still the gods, but the way they operate has been modernized to good effect. With the gods, of course, come the monsters of legend.

Riordan gets around the hurdle of all the fun mythological monsters being already dead by having them respawn at uneven increments. Vanquish the Minotaur and he might be gone for a lifetime or two weeks, for example.

My main problem with these books was not necessarily the sanitation of Greek mythology, some of the gory bits are left in, but we're supposed to think that these half-bloods were born because the gods and goddesses loved those mortals very, very much? I'm pretty sure I could count on one hand the number of god-human couplings that weren't forced, terrible things that left the mortal cursed or dead or a tree. Occasionally, like Ganymede, you could look forward to serving your rapist and kidnapper his food for eternity.

But I'm forgetting that these books are for the children. Which leads me to my next point, Riordan doesn't trust kids to remember anything. There is a need in a series to sum up certain relevent points in each book, but I'm pretty sure a kid is going to remember that Chiron is a centaur or that Percy Jackson is, I don't know, the son of Poseidon. There are only slim reasons to compare these to Harry Potter: pre-adolescent children discover they have powers, go to place to learn about them. There's a prophecy. That's it. But, as I was leading into with the Percy Jackson, who by the way has a father who is the ancient sea god, bit is that Riordan writes a lot of guff about a prophecy and doesn't deliver, he uses almost no foreshadowing at all, bits from one book to another are dropped or added. At one point a camper is killed on a mission and Percy feels sad about it, and I suppose the reader is to but why? Before ten pages before the character bit it there were no conversations with him, he was barely a name in their dining hall.

I must, however, acknowledge that Riordan understands that kids only need to talk in terms of "awesome" or "cool" and don't need to expand their vocabulary at all. Also that math and reading are hard. I'm sure as a teacher Riordan realizes kids will just pick up appreciation for those things elsewhere. Right. Really it just comes off as patronizing. He tops it off with the notion that ambrosia and nectar, the food of the gods that tastes like your favorite flavors, always tastes like cookies or fresh baked brownies to Percy. That just sounds refreshing, mmmm liquid cookie/brownies. All the time.

There's a suspician I have, and I had this even before I noticed it was a Disney publisher who put these books out, that Riordan uses a ghost writer simply because of how phoned in a lot of the 'meat' of the books are. He also has a lot of series running concurrently now that the original Percy Jackson is finished, R.L. Stine has some competition it seems like.

But, here I am rattling on and on about how simplistic and patronizing a series of books written for 11 and 12 years olds is. I know I would have liked these books, not as much as Redwall maybe (speaking of formulaic children's writing), but that's because I genuinely feel that Riordan didn't give Camp Half-Blood enough weight to become a place in a reader's head, which is the main thing if you want wish-fulfillment.

At times he really fulfilled the promise of a modernized greek mythology, Procruste's as a mattress salesman, Medusa shilling lawn ornaments, once when he hinted at the darker aspects of Dionysus' powers...also a rare appreciation of the much-forgotten Hestia. The books have a raving fan-base, the movie did pretty well, there just wasn't any spark to these books that made my reading Percy & pals tromping from one adventure to another anything but passing time. ( )

Mayores de 8 años

2.5 stars

I can’t summarize the plot very well, because I missed much of it. I do know that there is some kind of prophecy, something that’s supposed to happen to Percy, or something that Percy’s supposed to do when he’s 16 (maybe both) - I think it’s something dangerous. His 16th birthday is coming real soon.

I wanted to give this 3 stars (ok), but I listened to the audio, and the audios of these books just don’t hold my attention, though I caught some things here and there. From what I gathered there was lots of fighting, but hard to pick out a plot. Or, maybe that’s the idea? I wish I had looked back at my reviews for the other books in the series for that reminder to not listen to the audios. I do (kind of) know how it wrapped up – at least some of the things that happened at the end with Percy’s friends, and an agreement made with the gods.

I see that the series continues with a focus on the Camp for the demi-gods. Might be more interesting; I’m not sure, but I’m thinking it’s just not worthwhile for me to continue. Oh, and I still only ever think of a cute blue Muppet every time I hear the name “Grover”! And shoot, now that I’ve actually read the plot summary, I feel like I should lower my rating to 2 stars because I caught so little of that… ( )

I really enjoyed this book. It finished out the series strong and left me hoping he carries on with a "next gen" kind of thing. I would buy and read more if he did. ( )

Pol Mejillón! ( )