The Last Olympian

Rick Riordan's new Percy Jackson book, The Last Olympian, came out on Tuesday, and I handed a copy to Walker, my 13-year-old, as soon as he was released from middle school at 2:45. Despite having to take care of his guinea pig and rush through a bit of homework, he had laughed his way through it before going to his soccer game at 5:45, and he had a big grin on his face afterwards. Here's his review:

The 5th and final book in the Percy Jackson series is The Last Olympian. I have liked all the books in the Percy Jackson so far, and this newest installment doesn’t disappoint. It’s not an amazing book, but rather it finishes the series correctly. Everything comes out just the way it should. I don’t want to reveal too much, but everyone who should be a couple gets paired up, and every stray character gets a role.

This book was a fitting ending for the series, but didn’t stick out by itself. However, it fits Rick Riordan’s writing style with humorous insights and thoughts the whole way through. For example, Dionysus playing Pac-Man while warning Percy of doom:
“’I pulled you into party time to deliver a warning. We are in danger.’
‘Gee,’ I said. ‘Never would’ve figured that out. Thanks.’
He glared at me and momentarily forgot his game. Pac-Man got eaten by the red ghost dude.
‘Erre es korakas, Blinky!’ Dionysus cursed. ‘I will have your soul!’
‘Um, he’s a video game character,’ I said.
‘That’s no excuse!’ And you’re ruining my game, Jorgenson!’
‘Jackson.’
‘Whichever! Now listen, the situation is graver than you imagine. If Olympus falls, not only will the gods fade, but everything that is connected to our legacy will also begin to unravel. The very fabric of your puny little civilization—‘
The game played a song and Mr. D progressed to level 254.
‘Ha!’ he shouted. ‘Take that, you pixilated fiends!’”

After reading it, a bubble of contentment filled me, because the ending was just the way I wanted it to be. Although one could say the writing is not particularly deep, it has a whimsical, Harry Potter feel, which makes me feel happy.

All in all, this book is not a book to read if you haven’t read Rick Riordan’s other books, but to the 4.5 million readers out there, it fits the genre very well.
by Walker

To Walker's review, I would add that some of the humor in this book, as in all the previous ones, is exactly suited to the tastes of 9-14 year old boys, like this description of a fictional bad guy, a telkhine:
"He was about five feet tall, with slick black seal fur and stubby little feet. He had the head of a Doberman, but his clawed hands were almost human. He growled and muttered as he tapped on his keyboard. Maybe he was messaging his friends on uglyface.com."
Here's another example, for the slightly more sophisticated or well-read tween:
"I was afraid I'd miscalculated with the insults. What if they just blasted me without showing themselves? But these were New York river gods. I figured their instinct would be to get in my face."

As a reader, I liked the story; I read the book about as fast as Walker did. And as a mother, I thought it had its heart in the right place, as the last Olympian turns out to be Hestia, goddess of home and hearth. Percy's quest is to save the world, but he gets his mother's blessing beforehand, looks out for her during the battle, and lets her know that he's all right afterwards. Mighty satisfying for all ages.

The Battle of the Labyrinth

Of course Walker read the new Percy Jackson book, The Battle of the Labyrinth by Rick Riordan, the day I brought it home. As soon as he got out of school he picked it up and began reading me the chapter titles out loud (my favorite title is "Nico buys happy meals for the dead." Let me tell you, that chapter definitely delivers what it promises.) Walker also had to read me the first sentence out loud: "The last thing I wanted to do on my summer break was blow up another school." So Walker started reading at 2:30 and despite interruptions to take care of the guinea pigs and then the rabbit, finished at 5:30. "How was it?" I asked him. "It's better than #2 and as good as #1 and #3," he said.

Last night I finished reading it (courtesy of mother's day, time to sit around and read). It was thoroughly enjoyable all the way through. There's a nice mix of new characters and clever plot twists (yeah, they're literal in the labyrinth) with characters as old as myth itself and situations that you can see coming if you've read enough of the myths. Another good chapter title (well, they're all good, let's face it) is "We steal some slightly used wings." Guess whose. (Here's a hint: "'Land!' Annabeth yelled. 'These wings won't last forever.'")

One of the things that interests me about this book is Grover's quest to find Pan. It comes to a satisfactory conclusion, especially in terms of word etymology as an explanation of how the foes of the half-bloods are suddenly overthrown when Grover screams. But the culmination of Grover's search for Pan strikes me as a bit of a seam in this otherwise seamless fictional world. Grover and his friends are advised to take care of some little bit of nature, because the God can't do it anymore. It reads a bit like the usual kid "save the rainforest" propaganda. Don't get me wrong; I'm in favor of saving the rainforest. I gave an impromptu speech on it the other day when a kid came home from school asking "but what's wrong with drilling for oil in Alaska?" But I am not in favor of mixing propaganda in with fiction. Good fiction convinces because of the story, not in terms of something added to the story.

The whole kid conservation movement bothers me, and I'm beginning to be able to articulate why as I continue to read and think about what's currently being called "nature deficit disorder." Wouldn't it do the rain forest more good if a kid learned to value the nature in his own neighborhood and then extrapolate from that love to wider vistas as his power to influence his world grows? Kid conservation encourages them to pay lip service to a problem without being able to solve it. As adults, these kids are going to feel that they did what they could, but it didn't work. Oh well. On to something else.

But what else? I am a supporter of the space program and Robert Heinlein's idea that humans shouldn't "put all our eggs in one basket" (e.g. should find other inhabitable worlds). Have we done that, though? No, we've largely given in to the people who prate about how we shouldn't be exploring outer space when we can't even feed the people on earth who are hungry. And we shouldn't eat cheap hamburgers because they're raised on land chopped out of the rain forest, where medicines we can't even dream of could be available....

We do need someone larger than life, someone who doesn't have to be tarnished by the election process, to get us out of some of the strange loops created by teaching children the "correct" way to treat the earth. We need a Percy Jackson, with wise parents to guide him on a path neither of them can follow.

Disappointing Books

It's tax morning in America. Who else out there feels grumpy? I don't have any particular reason for feeling this way. Some minor reasons, perhaps--Eleanor is in the final two weeks of rehearsals for A Midsummer Night's Dream (she's in the group of players, the Wall, which is funny because she's tall), and that further complicates our after-school round of homework, animal care, and soccer practice. She and I, who need a lot of sleep, are a little low on sleep after Avenue Q on Sunday night and math homework/symphony rehearsal last night. Ron is dealing with work all day and night--a student's e-mail address was used for spamming, so now all Kenyon e-mail is liable to be put on the spam list at the places we try to send it. The contractor's father went to the ER yesterday and the plumber's mother is sick, so the hole in our wall remains unattended. It's supposed to warm up today, so instead of blowing cold air into the bedroom, the hole will most likely start admitting insect hordes.

On top of all this, I read a book that disappointed me. Not just one that I didn't like,* but one that didn't live up to my expectations for it. After Marilynne Robinson wrote Housekeeping, a truly wonderful novel, she came to the University of Maryland, College Park, where I was a graduate student, to give what was billed as a reading. When I went with a group of fellow grad students, we were all deeply disappointed that she talked about some kind of political cause for an hour, and didn't say a word about her book, except that she wasn't going to talk about it. And then, years later, she wrote Gilead, which I thought was pretentious and boring.

Another kind of literary disappointment actually comes from an author thinking of a idea so wonderful that there's really no way to carry it all out. Phillip Pullman did this, with the third book about Lyra, The Amber Spyglass. He's so busy making sure all the loose ends are tidied up that there's no real narrative pull, at least for me, and that's a shame, because The Golden Compass is such a great book. Jack McDevitt has practically made a career out of thinking of fantastic and fascinating ideas that can't live up to the kind of promise they make, like in his book Ancient Shores.

Then there's the kind of disappointment that comes from enjoying a first book by an author and actually having that enjoyment diminished by a second book about the same characters. This is the disappointment I got from reading Love, Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli. The original story of Stargirl is charming and quirky and encouraging for kids (or adults) who need some extra courage to be themselves in a conformist world. Stargirl is a mysterious figure, to some extent, and that's part of her charm. You don't know exactly what motivates her, but you know she has a good heart and plays well with others. One of my favorite parts of Stargirl is when she cheers for the opposing sports team because she's afraid they'll feel bad when they're losing.

Love, Stargirl tells me more than I wanted to know about Stargirl's motives. It makes her human, which is not what her name promises. I wanted someone to look up to, a girl from the stars. The second book about her drags her down to earth and through the mud with the rest of us. It also makes her less plausible, because when she's more human, it seems even less likely that she can continue to do the interesting things she does, like claim a truly obnoxious child ten years younger than herself as a best friend. The only thing about the book that doesn't make me grumpy is that I got it out of the library and can go and chuck it back in today. It's an even bigger disappointment to find that you've actually spent money on a disappointing book.

*Recent examples of books I didn't like are Gods Behaving Badly by Marie Phillips and The Corps of the Bare-Boned Plane by Polly Horvath--but maybe I didn't like Gods Behaving Badly because I think Rick Riordan's The Lightning Thief and Anne Ursu's The Shadow Thieves are better. Also I liked Polly Horvath's Everything on a Waffle, so I had high expectations for any book by her.

Child Heroes

Walker spent much of the weekend at tryouts for Peter Pan and then callbacks. They had him sing for John at first on the callback day, but the musical director kept calling him up to sing with the Peters, too. At worst, he'll get to be a lost boy. I think they're a bit reluctant to cast a 12-year-old as the lead of the annual community theater musical, especially one requiring deep enough pockets to rent "flying" equipment.

It was kind of a shame, I thought, that there were only three boys singing for Peter in the callbacks, and the other two were too old; their voices were deeper already. Obviously, someone was trying to hear males for the role, but I think it's probably going to be a Mary Martin-type show, given the number of girls who sang better and were older than twelve (one was 20, but a very small person). I did have a small revelation, sitting in the back row of the theater listening to Walker sing. We're always on him at home not to sing at the table, and not to sing right in our faces. That's because he has an increasingly powerful voice!

At any rate, it got me thinking about child heroes, and how often in YA fantasy literature, the adults are reluctant to entrust the fate of the world to one so young. (The first examples that come to my mind are: Lyra in The Golden Compass, the four children in Narnia, Artemis Fowl, Gregor the Overlander, Percy Jackson in The Lightning Thief, Lina and Doon in The City of Ember, Molly Moon, Roald Dahl's Matilda, Ethan in Summerland).

Deeba in China Mieville's Un Lun Dun is a child hero in a book that turns a lot of conventions on their heads in a thoroughly delightful manner. For the first 134 pages, it seems to be a traditional child hero tale--the "chosen one" is recognized by animals in our world and is subsequently transported to another world she has been chosen to save. But she is frightened and ultimately beaten, and goes back to her world, where she stays. Okay, maybe you guessed it from the title--the other world is a parallel universe--an Un-London--and the child who can actually save it is the Un-chosen one, Deeba, who no one has made much of a fuss over.

That's just the first delightful twist to this story. There are a lot of good word jokes that eventually degenerate into puns and actual characters (called "utterlings"). The chosen one from the first part of the book is referred to in Un Lun Dun as the "shwazzy" which we eventually learn is a version of the term "vous avez choisi." London's Royal Meteorological Society, abbreviated as RMETS, is referred to in Un Lun Dun as Armets, a magical society of "weatherwitches." And the mysterious thing that solved London's smog problem in 1952 is Un Lun Dun's magical talisman against the magically malignant smog that threatens their entire existence, the Klinneract.

There are wonderful and original details in this story, like a character who is a ghost (called a wraith), some very scary giraffes, and an army of animate umbrellas, plus a flying bus and a suspension bridge that moves around to evade people looking for it.

This is a book for book-lovers, but not too inaccessible for kids (like Summerland, you'll enjoy it more, the more other books you've read).