Rosencrantz & Guildenstern, Ltd.

I’ve now read up to The Battle of the Labyrinth, the fourth book in the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series by Rick Riordan, and I wanted to do a quick rundown of my thoughts about the series before I get to the last book.

I was introduced to this series by one of my aunts, but I’ve been reading my mom’s copies.  Let me say first that even after I finish the series, I fully intend to purchase the whole series myself.  I try to read a lot of young adult (YA) fiction because I’m an English teacher, and let me first say that I think this series is excellent for middle and high schoolers.  Like Riordan’s characters, his writing style is action oriented, moving quickly through the story.  His prose is straightforward and not overly descriptive (which is a good thing).  He gives you just enough description to jump-start your imagination without spelling everything out; this is excellent for teenage readers, as many of my students suffer from a lack of imagination.

When I first started reading The Lighting Thief, I immediately began comparing Riordan’s world with American Gods by Neil Gaiman.  The two share a similar concept: as people move, their gods move with them.  Riordan’s mythology, however, is much more focused.  In American Gods, the gods of the old world moved with the immigrants to America: Slavic, Norse, African, Indian, etc.  Riordan, however, sticks with Greek mythology, and instead of moving with individual immigrants, the gods move with Western Civilization (Greece being considered the foundation of it).  For both authors this presented an interesting challenge: incorporating the old gods into current society.  Riordan does an excellent job with this, and as with his descriptions, leaves some of it up to the readers.  For example, he never fully explains where the Lotus Casino comes from, giving those familiar with Greek mythology a little treat and those not-as-familiar something to find themselves.

From a character perspective, Riordan keeps his adolescents fully adolescent: like all teenagers, they are between childhood and adulthood, capable on the one hand of adult reasoning in some situations, and falling back into childish behavior in others.  The boy-girl relationships are particularly annoying in a realistic way.  I keep wanting to scream at the characters to just talk with each other openly, but like many males (myself included), Percy Jackson is often completely oblivious to the feelings of the girls around.  Despite the teenagery-ness of it all (and that’s not a criticism), I’m interested in finding out how the current love-quadrangle plays out, given the fleeting nature of most adolescent “love” relationships.  The gods are continually annoying in their lack of maturity, but as with the teenagers this is realistic, given how they were often portrayed in the mythology: capricious, easily insulted, and filled with self-importance (much like teenagers).

There are probably a couple of points that will annoy Greek mythology purists.  The biggest thing at the moment is the mixup of Kronos/Cronus with Chronos (they weren’t actually the same), but if one really wants to get picky, Riordan’s left himself a loophole (based in the history of mythology) to explain it away: the Greeks themselves weren’t sticklers for continuity and often had contradictory stories about their gods.

In the end I highly recommend this series to all readers middle-school and above.  I can’t speak for younger readers, primarily because I have very little experience with elementary-school children, but I imagine these books would be good a more mature fourth or fifth-grader as well (parental discretion should always be in force, of course).