Percy jackson headsup: Rick Riordan interview

attention Percy Jackson Fans:

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he wrote the original because his son was ADHD and dyslexic, and wrote about a kid with ADHD and dyslexia who saves the world.

I had bought most of the original series for Ruby, but after she lost the book "The House of Hades" when she almost got drowned in her car during a typhoon a couple years ago, she sort of got PTSS when she read them so lost interest (also she started to notice boys about that time and switched her reading to Jane Auten and teen romances).

In some ways, they remind me of the Juvie Sci fi novels of Heinlein, who also had geeky heroes and strong intelligent women who helped them.

(Pee wee, call your office).

however, Apollo is openly bisexual, and the Norse series has an Iraqi American valkarie who wears a hijab  (yes, the Vikings had links with the Caliphate), so if you are worried about such things you might want to avoid them.

On the other hand, such things are quite benign next to the real stories in mythology. But Percy does try to make these things PG rated in the book:



One way to get your kids to learn stories about the ancient Greeks, without reading the boring versions we had to read in school in the good old days.

Percy Jackson the musical?

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upddate: I checked out the book...
the dual person he talks about is not a trans, but a person who switches from one sex to another, and this has little or nothing to do with the character in this book, albeit she also has the ability to change to look like her half sister in a heroic way in a previous book, if I remember it correctly.

The real "gay" character who should be noticed is Nico, who saves the world in the first Percy series, saves his sister Hazel and helps save the world in the second Percy series. But until the end of the second series he is too young to realize why he risked his life to save Percy.

Percy is a boy scout, Annabeth is wonderful but Nico is the most interesting character in the series...

Finally, in the Viking book he discusses, it ends with the hero, who inherited a huge house in Boston, opening it as a shelter for street kids (he lived on the street two years).

That is NOT something a proper Viking would do, but something someone with a Judeo/Christian/Muslim heritage would do.

In the same way, Percy at the end of the first series, gives up immortality because he wants to live with Annabeth as a normal man when he becomes an adult. This actually goes along with the anti "honor" ideas of the Iliad/Odyssey, where Odysseus gives up immortality to return to his wife, and Achilles regrets he chose fame over living an ordinary life down on the farm.

But the next part: Percy, when he turned down this gift, asked for another: That the gods pay attention to the kids they begat and then abandoned.

Indeed, the most shocking part of the series is that so many of the kids were thrown out, or ran away and no one seemed to care if they lived or died...

Percy is a happy exception to this, but the parental neglect is the backstory for why so many demigods turn against the "gods" to help the Titans and later Mother Gaia try to take over the world, even though by doing so humanity would suffer.

And so there is indeed a Judeo/Christian/Muslim ethical standard behind the plots, which emphasize helping one's friends and risking one's life to save the world, but also the ethic which is not found in traditional Greek/Roman or Viking religion, about caring for the weak.



Finally, if you want a "Christian" version of these types of books, Raymond Arroyo has written the Will Wilder series which is available at Scribd....