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A review by owlette
The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan
3.0
There are some things I liked. I loved that you took the Long Island Railroad to Olympus and squirted a water gun to make a rainbow to summon Iris. The heart-to-heart conversation that Percy had with Grover and Annabeth in chapter 16 was my favorite dialogue. That Grover's reed-pipe repertoire consists of Motzart's Piano Concerto No.12 and Hilary Duff's "So Yesterday" is the best character trait I've ever seen in YA fiction.
I have mixed feelings about the way Riordan writes low fantasy ancient Greek mythology. As I said, I loved the clever ways Riordan adapted Greek mythologies into 21st-century American landscape such as the casino in Las Vegas (an allusion to the lotuses in the Odyssey). But then I rolled my eyes when Annabeth would be standoffish towards Percy because their parents aren't on good terms because of ancient stories. In other words, I preferred when mythologies were employed metaphorically but not when characters took them seriously at face value.
Finally, I wish Riordan didn't explain why the Greek gods lived in America by saying that these gods embody the "Western civilization." On the one hand, I'm horrified that this was written in 2006 after 911. Then again, this is also the sort of thing that could have been written in the 2000's after 911. The Classics has always had such an uncanny relationship with white supremacy to the point that a Classics scholar has claimed that the whole discipline should be disposed from academia. I haven't read the whole series to tell whether this conceit is supposed to be ironic, but consider the insensitivities of describing the forest next to Camp Half-God
as being so thick that "nobody had been there since the Native Americans" and then later celebrating George Washington because this slave-owning American hero was a son of Athena.
Some fans might object to my complaint. Surely, Riordan had to come up with something to explain why Olympian gods were in the United States even if that meant tainting their reputation with a colonial-imperialist legacy. But he didn't have to! There's a Japanese manga series, [b:アリーズ 1 神話の星座宮|51963270|アリーズ 1 神話の星座宮 (Japanese Edition)|冬木るりか|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1583073423l/51963270._SY75_.jpg|76603171], that brings the Olympian gods to modern Japan of all places! Supposedly, these immortal gods reincarnated into Japanese teenagers. It's dumb, I know, and that's fine. My 10-year-old brain didn't care. Riordan could have done the same with his Greek gods. Just say something like, they're in America because the planets aligned ever so nicely and they spelled out the North American continent.
I have mixed feelings about the way Riordan writes low fantasy ancient Greek mythology. As I said, I loved the clever ways Riordan adapted Greek mythologies into 21st-century American landscape such as the casino in Las Vegas (an allusion to the lotuses in the Odyssey). But then I rolled my eyes when Annabeth would be standoffish towards Percy because their parents aren't on good terms because of ancient stories. In other words, I preferred when mythologies were employed metaphorically but not when characters took them seriously at face value.
Finally, I wish Riordan didn't explain why the Greek gods lived in America by saying that these gods embody the "Western civilization." On the one hand, I'm horrified that this was written in 2006 after 911. Then again, this is also the sort of thing that could have been written in the 2000's after 911. The Classics has always had such an uncanny relationship with white supremacy to the point that a Classics scholar has claimed that the whole discipline should be disposed from academia. I haven't read the whole series to tell whether this conceit is supposed to be ironic, but consider the insensitivities of describing the forest next to Camp Half-God
as being so thick that "nobody had been there since the Native Americans" and then later celebrating George Washington because this slave-owning American hero was a son of Athena.
Some fans might object to my complaint. Surely, Riordan had to come up with something to explain why Olympian gods were in the United States even if that meant tainting their reputation with a colonial-imperialist legacy. But he didn't have to! There's a Japanese manga series, [b:アリーズ 1 神話の星座宮|51963270|アリーズ 1 神話の星座宮 (Japanese Edition)|冬木るりか|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1583073423l/51963270._SY75_.jpg|76603171], that brings the Olympian gods to modern Japan of all places! Supposedly, these immortal gods reincarnated into Japanese teenagers. It's dumb, I know, and that's fine. My 10-year-old brain didn't care. Riordan could have done the same with his Greek gods. Just say something like, they're in America because the planets aligned ever so nicely and they spelled out the North American continent.