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Book #34 The Lightning Thief : Percy Jackson and the Olympians

Last week I read the book, The Lightning Thief, by Rick Riordan which is the first book in a series of books, about humans that are half-human and half-god, they are called half-bloods.

This book brings us back in the world of Greek mythology, and then brings that world into western civilization in the United States. I loved this book, not only for the great writing, action packed plot, and dynamic characters, but because it has a lot of history, facts, myths, and tales rolled up into a fiction novel. I love that as a teacher's viewpoint, students would read this, and then want to read some Greek mythology to better understand characters in the book, circumstances, and innuendos. This story follows a 6th grade boy, Percy Jackson, from a school where he is attacked to Olympus where he.... I'll leave that up to you to find out!

I do have some criticism, Percy Jackson in the book is supposed to go to the Underworld and get the lightning bolt back, and then return it to Zeus to avoid a war, this means he has to travel across the United States on his own, with Gods and Monsters following him, and he's only a 6th grader? I don't think that is a very good age for this character to be, and I'm not sure if the author thought it would be the best age to start, to continue with his next novels in the series, but it doesn't seem plausible to me really. I wish that Percy would have been in 8th or 9th grade, and then I could really see him doing some of the stuff that he does in the book. In the movie version, he does seem a lot older, they don't allude to his age, which makes me think they wanted Percy to be older as well.

The movie version of this was what got me wanting to read the first book. Now that I have read the book though, I think the book is much better. The movie itself seems rushed, more complicated than it needs to be, and not as good with the conflict in the story. They made changes in the plot, in order to better explain it to people who have not watched the movie, but I think that it just made it more confusing, and that they should have just kept it like the book.

All in all though, I really liked the book, and I think that many people would enjoy this series, especially young students in 6th, 7th, and 8th grade. Although, many adults would too!

Rating: (out of seven stars)

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