Percy Jackson

Thank God, for Harry Potter. I'm serious when I say that my dear readers. He gave the young adult section of the book store a serious shot in the arm. Ok, not everything is worthy, but then it never is. The point is there are now more books being written for young readers, and more youth are reading. This cannot be a bad thing.

Now Percy Jackson, has joined Harry Potter (ok, we can do with less heroes with whimpy names, but thats just me) onto the silver screen and the DVD. What are the differences between the two? Well first, Percy is not an orphan. He dearly loves his mother, but never really knew his dad. This becomes far less mysterious when it turns out dear old dad is Poseidon. For some reason there is some rule that Gods can't be close to their kids. There's also another rule that only the kids of the Gods can steal from another God.

Who writes these rules I have no idea.

Percy is also a bit older than Harry when Harry started his adventures. He's a trouble teen who believes he has dyslexia and ADD. Turns out these are good things. His brain is actually "hard wired" to read ancient greek and the ADD is just his highly tuned demigod battle reflexes. Both good things to have when you do discover you are a demigod and others are trying to kill you.

Oh, yes another difference is that the stakes start off much higher than they did for the first Harry novels. No school hijinks here, Percy has to find the Lightning Thief or Zeus is going to start a God war. This is not a good thing for us mortals. Also, just for kicks, Hades pops up, kidnaps Percy's mother and demands the Lightning for himself.

From here the movie does go pretty much Harry potter all the way with a greek flavor. Harry, opps PERCY, gathers his new friends (A daughter of athena and a satyr), and they go on a series of adventures. They decide to raid the underworld and to do that they need to gather the three pearls that will allow them to lave the underworld.

It's all good fun for the kids. It is not hard to guess who the Lightning Thief is, but then since a lot of kids seeing this have already read the book, I don't think this is much of a let down. Also, just from nerd perspective they don't hurt greek myths tooooo badly. I'll admit the idea of a "Camp halfblood" sort of like fat camp for demigods sort makes me ache a bit, but really no worse than a school for wizardy and you get to learn leather crafts!