Review Detail

Reader reviewed by Kelsey

These books are magic. Every single one of the Percy Jackson books drew
me into the plot and the characters. I cannot set these books down!
Rick Riordan is a wordsmith and I highly recommend these books to not
just teens, but adults as well. I'm going to recommend these to my mom. I
know she'd love them!

As I was reading through the first four
books, I can't help but draw some similarities between the Percy Jackson
series and the Harry Potter series:

1. Both Percy and Harry have
a mentor: Chiron and Dumbledore, respectively. They give their
protegees advice, especially on their different quests.

2. Harry
has Ron and Hermoine, Percy has Grover and Annabeth. Each of their
friends joins Harry/Percy on their journeys and helps him.

3.
Percy and Harry each have a "safe place" that they go to. For Harry,
that place is Hogwarts, and for Percy it's Camp Half-Blood (whose name
reminds me of the 6th book of the HP series).

4. There are
prophecies told of both boys. Harry's prophecy is that he must overcome
Voldemort or he will be killed by him. Percy's prophecy is that when he
is sixteen years old, he will either destroy or save the world.

5.
Speaking of prophecies, there is a prophet in both series: Professor
Trelawney and the Oracle. Even though Pro. Trelawney's prophecies rarely
come true, she is the one who spoke Harry's prophecy.

6. Hagrid
and Tyson are similar characters. They are both huge: Hagrid being a
giant and Tyson being a Cyclops. Another similarity between the two is
that they like strange animals. For example, Hagrid is fascinated by
dragons and Fluffy, and Tyson is enamored with Blackjack and those of
his kind.

7. There is an object of invisibility in each series.
Harry has his cloak of invisibility, and Annabeth has her hat that when
wearing, one's body is invisible.

8. A similarity in The Battle
of the Labyrinth that I noticed was the storyline about Kronos. When
each member joins his cause, he gets a piece of his body back, until
eventually he is all fit together and has a physical body. This reminded
me a lot of Voldemort. Because after he was nearly destroyed when he
tried to kill Harry, he had to rely on others to get his full body back.
For example, Professor Quirrel in The Sorcerer's Stone allowed
Voldemort to attach himself to his body.

9. Voldemort split his
soul into (I think it was) seven horcruxes. This is almost exactly what
Daedalus did when he created his five automatons.

I'm not sure if
these similarities are intentional or not, but throughout reading the
series I sure found a lot of them! I'm not saying that this series is
not as good because of the parallelism, it's just that I wish Riordan
would come up with something new and different that we haven't already
read in another series.

An aspect that I enjoyed about these
three books is the growing maturity of the three main characters: Percy,
Annabeth, and Grover. Toward the end of the fourth book, Grover took
the lead of the satyrs and told them what they should do to protect the
wild. Annabeth said "Grover seems to be growing up." Percy and
Annabeth's relationship gets more complicated with the return of Rachel
Dare in The Battle of the Labyrinth. Annabeth becomes jealous and angry
at Percy. But the maturity isn't so much that it's unrealistic. They
make mistakes just like humans and they learn from them.

Another
thing I'd like to mention about these books is that even though there is
darkness and sadness in them, there is also plenty of humor. I have
laughed so much during these books, which is rare for me because most of
the books I read don't have original humor.