What Is It About
Percy Jackson and the Olympians is a book series featuring the adventures of a young demigod named Percy Jackson, who finds out he is half human and half god. Upon discovering his father is Poseidon – the Greek god of sea, earthquakes, storms, and horses – Percy learns to control his power of water and fights monsters that want to harm him. Along with his friends, Annabeth Chase, who is the daughter of Athena – the goddess of wisdom, war, and the crafts – and Grover, who is a satyr and the Lord of the Wild, they battle their way until they are faced with the task of defeating Kronos, the King of the Titans, and saving Mount Olympus.
The book series is created by Rick Riordan, an American author who has written numerous New York Times Best Sellers, and largely known for his Percy Jackson series.
When I First Began Reading It
I remember vividly when I first sat down and opened the pages of one of the books in the series. I was in 6th grade at the time, and my school had this challenge called the Action 100. It was created by the American Reading Company where they state the goal is that “every student logs 100 hours of successful independent reading each year, to include thirty minutes daily in school and thirty minutes daily at home”. I was looking through the book shelf in my teacher’s classroom and my eyes caught a book cover of a boy in the center of vibrant brownish-red flames and a big maze underneath him. I was instantly intrigued by the cover, and I read the summary before opening up to the first page.
Regrettably, it did take me awhile to finish the book as I read the first few chapters and fell out of it. But instead of putting the book back on the shelf, I kept it in my book bag as I still needed to complete the Action 100 challenge, and I would just write down the book title and not read a page to complete the task. Then one day, we were reading our books in-class so I didn’t really have the choice to not read, so I decided to continue reading my Percy Jackson book. And that’s when the plot started to get interesting. I have read past the introduction and the part where the plot needs to be set up, and that’s when things started to get intense. I couldn’t put the book down after that. I would read it at school, and I would read it at home.
When I finished the book, I realized that it was the fourth book in the series, so I started more than halfway through Percy’s adventure. Wanting to know what happens, I decided to start from the first book and kept reading until I closed the last page of the last book in the series. I loved Percy Jackson and the Olympians so much that I started reading the second series that followed it. And once in awhile, I would always come back to re-reading the books because not only is it enjoyable, but it also brings me back to my middle school days.
Percy Jackson and the Olympians, the Live-Action
Disney released the live-action rendition of the Percy Jackson book series in December 2023. With Riordan writing parts of the script and making casting calls, fans are excited that the show will be successful. Although I have not watched the television series yet, I cannot wait to start watching it because it will feel like I am experiencing Percy’s adventures for the first time again. That is a feeling I will never get tired of.
Karen Li 