BookChick Recommends “The Lightning Thief”
Fine, so it’s a No. 1 New York Times Bestseller. So the movie comes out in one month. So maybe I’m ridiculously late to the game.
Still, if you haven’t read the Percy Jackson and the Olympian series by Rick Riordan, now would be a good time to start. The first book in the series is The Lightning Thief and it is the story of Percy Jackson, who has a perennial problem of getting kicked out of every school he’s been to. Finally, when he’s 12 it’s revealed that he’s a demi-god, the son of one of the Greek Gods from Mount Olympus and a mortal. Percy then must go on a quest to retrieve Zeus’ stolen thunderbolt to prevent a world war between the Gods.
But it’s not the specifics of the quest that make this story interesting. The Lightning Thief works because it’s a cool adventure series. Set in modern day, Riordan has moved Mount Olympus to the 600th floor of the Empire State Building, transferred Hades to a recording studio in Los Angeles, and given the God of War a rumbling motorcycle to ride in on. Then there’s Percy, a born-and-bred New Yorker, who’s quick with a quip and still has a chip on his shoulder that gets him both in and out of trouble.
Riordan has crafted a fully-realized and believable world of Gods, demi-gods and monsters living among us, though not terribly harmoniously. Which of course, makes for a great story.
