Firstly, this is an incomplete review of Rick Riordan’s acclaimed tween fantasy series. So far I’ve churned through two of the five books in fairly short order, and I feel I’ve read enough to have formed some solid opinions about the work. If anything pressing arises from the remaining stories I will be sure to update this blog. It’s impossible to find a review of this body of work that doesn’t reference Harry Potter so I’ll get my licks in quick and run away to safer terrain. Frankly Harry Potter is, from my memory of reading only the first book several years ago, dreadful. There, I said it. I read it as the hype machine for the first film rose to crescendo and the book simply dissappointed. The world just seemed haphazard and the mythology sloppily constructed. Coincidentally, mythology is where Riordan shines. Which is unsurprising since the entire series is built on the premise that the Greek gods of antiquity didn’t simply vanish when they went out of fasion, they just changed addresses. It would have been an extra nice touch if the link had been made from the pagan pantheon to the Christian calendar of saints, but I guess that’s a little beyond the scope of a YA adventure series and it probably would have raised more questions than it answered. Enter Perseus Jackson, our modern day, well, Perseus. Yes the classic tradition of the gods impregnating mortal women continues, and our hero happens to be the son of Posiedon. It’s a juicy story hook with some nice modern extrapolation on the antique myths. For the most part, though, everything is fairly familiar to anyone who spent hours poring through books detailing precicely these same myths. Riordan does a great job incorporating the old with the new, but it’s clear that education trumped over most other concerns, and even where the depiction has altered in some way the alteration is generally explained. Yet while it would be easy to call this work derivative, somehow I’m really enjoying it. Concise descriptions leave plenty of room for imagination, and most situations are resolved within a short chapter so even when you know how this particular myth goes, the next one isn’t too far off, and may have a more original twist. There’s some real page momentum behind these stories. Furthermore the overarching plot of Percy vs the big bad evil remains a compelling enough mystery to ilicit a strong desire to open the next book just as you close the last one. My criticisms are few, but chief among them is that Riordan openly leaves his personal life and opinions on the page. Which is a difficult criticism to make - after all, it is his prerogative as creator and writer - but it’s a jarring break to my suspension of disbelief when an author who can describe the cannons mounted on a Confederate steamer cannot describe more than two games in an infinite arcade. An arcade which is, of course, a den of evil. It’s a fairly minor qualm in what is an excellent effort to recontextualise classic stories and make them engaging for a pre-early teen audience, without simply producing yet another non-fiction book about the era. As a 25 year old it’s the type of book I would have been all over 10 - 15 years ago, and I’m happy to read them now.