Echoes of stories past

Whew! I finished The Lightning Thief with very little time to spare-- in an hour I'll be seeing the film version. I didn't want my views of the book tainted by the movie, so here we are. So, even reading through the last half at top speed, how was Rick Riordan's beloved book?

Pretty good, I'm surprised to say. Definitely not great, but satisfying.

Once again, I had a lot of anticipation going into this one, because my sister's been telling me to read it for months. And then when the movie came out, I glimpsed reviews that called the film a Harry Potter knockoff. Of course they would-- it's the same director, Chris Columbus, who did the first two Potter films.

And, yeah-- when you look at it, the book's a bit like Harry Potter in a mild American Gods setting, where the only gods transferred to the homeland are the Greek/Roman ones. Only it's not as good as Harry Potter. Several authors have tried the school formula before, with other series; Charlie Bone and Evil Genius come to mind. The problem that none of them have figured out yet is how to create believable characters in a well-rounded social setting. J.K. Rowling did this perfectly, but the Charlie Bone, Evil Genius, and Percy Jackson and the Olympians universes seeme empty by comparison. In this book, very few other campers are introduced to us.

So we spend most of the book questing. And that works out pretty well, because Percy's companions - a satyr and another demigod - are somewhere between friends and guides. It's a chemistry that, if you're not expecting Potter, just manages to work.

So now we get to our next problem: how do you update the Greek myths? It's not an easy thing to do, either, and at first Rick Riordan seems to be doing horribly. We get the impression that the gods, in two thousand years of existence, haven't progressed at all in their relationships. And here's the thing -- I can understand if their basic characters remain immortal (since they themselves cannot die). But when the best stories about them that you're citing happened two thousand years ago, that makes me feel like nothing's happened since the Greeks were writing down the myths, and it's difficult at best to believe that the gods harbor grudges that last for milennia.

To Riordan's credit, he addresses the problem of the gods' immortality towards the end of the book, and it makes me feel like the series might go in a very interesting direction come book 2. Then again, it might not; why fix what isn't broke, right? Percy's quest is largely made up of meeting old monsters that have updated themselves for the 21st century, to varying degrees; while Medusa and the Minotaur are largely unchanged, the Lotus Eaters have been given an interesting twist. He meets a few of the gods (I would have liked to meet Hephaestus myself), and blunders into various traps. After a few Potter-like episodes where his friends do all the work for him, he figures out that the best way to get past monsters and gods is to feed their egos. It's at about this point -- two-thirds of the way through the book -- that the novel really begins to find its voice. It's also here when Percy starts using his god-given powers. It made the book more unique, which is why I started to enjoy it.

So I give The Lightning Thief, in the end, a hesitant recommendation. It has millennia-old stories to rise above, and it just manages to do it by the end. It's not the best book I've read recently, but it's not as bad as Charlie Bone, and it really could improve. Because what makes the book -- and could make the series -- is when it starts creating stories worthy of the myths. A stolen lightning bolt, a camp of demigods, powers based off of mental disorders, and a beach battle with Areas are good starting points. Let's hope that Rick Riordan can make something of himself.