Like most people I found the end of Harry Potter a little hard to deal with. No more books to look forward to. We always knew there would only be seven but the reality of getting to the end was something I didn’t really think through. Not until I held that final book in my hands and was torn between saving it or devouring it. I waited for a whole day. A day that I spent indoors too frightened to go out or turn on the television, petrified of the internet and any spoilers I might inadvertently come across. So I read it and it was over. Harry Potter gets some flack from a lot of different directions and I don’t care. I loved every book and I still do, like gazillions of others.So that saga was over and there was nothing to replace it. A lot of book blurbs and reviews claimed that this was it , yes really, this book in your hand, this was the book that would be the new Harry Potter. But they weren’t and in the end I gave up and let the matter rest.
Then, recently, at the airport on my way to France, I picked up a copy of Percy Jackson and the Lightening Thief. I’d seen a film trailer at the cinema and thought it looked ok, so decided to give it a go. I loved it. Couldn’t put it down in fact. Later I saw the film and that was a completely different thing altogether but I won’t go into that here.
From the start I was hooked. I loved the use of familiar myths and the way that Rick Riordan is educating as well as entertaining in a way that J.K Rowling never really did, for me. It reminded me of all those Sunday films I watched as a child and yes as an adult. Jason and the Argonauts, Clash of the Titans and many more. Some might call it a rip off I prefer to think of it as homage.
The protagonist is likeable and endlessly flawed as most teenagers, well most people are. I especially love the take that Riordan gives on dyslexia explaining that most of the children of gods suffer with this because they are programmed to read ancient Greek not English. It’s a whole new slant on that teenage day dream that these can’t be my parents I must come from somewhere else.
I’ve read the first two books of the series and the other three are on my bedside table waiting to be read. I don’t want to rush something this good. And that’s the best bit too. It hasn’t ended yet and I hope that Riordan has no intentions of finishing the saga too soon.
