Book #9: The Lightning Thief

Title: The Lightning Thief  (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Book 1)
Author: Rick Riordan

Last time I was in The King's English, I asked one of the employees what my reluctant-reading fourth-grader might be interested in. She recommended the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series, and when Bryce finished the first book and asked for the second, I knew she was on the right track. When he saw that that book was being made into a movie (to be released next month), he told me that I needed to read the book before the movie came out (hey, I've used that tactic on him before!), I made sure that I got right on it.

I enjoyed The Lightning Thief. It's quick-paced and funny, with a likable protagonist in Percy Jackson, the boy who has gotten kicked out of six schools in six years and discovers at the beginning of the novel that he's a half-blood, the child of one human parent and one godly parent (in this case Poseidon is his father). He joins other half-bloods at a camp on Long Island, not too far removed from New York City, the seat of Western Civilization and the current home of the gods. Soon after his arrival, he's sent with two friends on a quest to retrieve Zeus's lost lightning bolt. If he fails, a world war of the scope we've never seen will start, so it's a pretty tall order for a twelve-year-old.

My main quibble with the book is that Percy's mom disappears and is presumed dead at the beginning of the book. In the first few chapters, Riordan does a good job demonstrating that Percy and his mom are unusually close. She disappears just as he arrives at Camp Half-Blood, and all of his surroundings are new and much different than he's used to, and he starts to realize his place in the world. But I'd like to think that maybe he would have been so broken up over his mother's disappearance that he wouldn't notice things like the leanness of the meat in the cafeteria Instead, he takes her "death" in stride. I know the book is fantasy, but that was one part where the difference between fiction and reality seemed a little bit too unbelievable.