I may have been a bit late on the Percy Jackson train, considering it took me until my freshman year of college to even get started on The Lightning Thief. Now that I'm in a mythology class, the themes and characters that were first presented to me by Rick Riordan keep reminding me just how great his books are.
BUT NOT THIS.
Being a classics/myths nerd, finding an author who found a way to bring the ancient world into the modern one was incredible. While studying the ancients, they can sometimes seem very removed from the world that we live in: the technology, culture, the deities -- it all seems so different from what we see today. However, Rick Riordan takes that difference and really plays with it to produce this type of universe that explains how they've remained seemingly separate, but have been together all along. Instead of completely disappearing, the ancient world has evolved to fit into pieces of the modern one, as cultures do.
The elements of Greco-Roman myth that he includes in his stories are also really well-done. There are some people who can lay down god/titan lineages just off the top of their heads because of the relationships presented by the Percy Jackson series. The presence of dreams as agents of telling the future, heroes being used as pawns for the gods and "The Mist" being a force that shields anything related to deities from the eyes of mortals are all elements present in myths such as the Iliad.
Even disregarding the mythical elements of the stories, the character building is just so good and realistic for an interconnected, multicultural world like today. Just in the two series that I read, there were people of color, people from different social standings, elements of conditions like dyslexia and LGBTQ+ representation. Those are just off of the top of my head and I haven't even read any of his books beyond the final Heroes of Olympus, to my dismay. Even the fact that Riordan had that many characters existing at once, then gave them unique relationships as well as their own personal anxieties, struggles and story arcs makes this incredible.
My absolute favorite scene that I've ever read comes from a moment where Percy -- a confident, capable, kind-hearted leader among the demi-gods in Heroes of Olympus -- tosses his kindness aside and allows his anger to twist him into an almost villainous figure in Tartarus, the kind of Hell landscape of Greco-Roman myth. His reaction to that situation in comparison to his reaction to every other situation he found himself in, along with his character in every other book leading up to that moment, really just made that scene so impactful.
Despite its reputation for being simply a children/young adult book series, I believe Riordan's Percy Jackson and Heroes of Olympus series are books that anyone could pick up and love. It's accessible and could really teach readers something about storytelling. I, personally, want to undertake a project like this one day, too. Until then, I look forward to seeing how Riordan can integrate more myth into our society, because these days we could use some more of the old gods.
