Doing things a bit different for the review this time. I ordered The Sea of Monsters, The Titan's Curse, and The Battle of the Labyrinth from the library, and (of course) they were all ten-day books. So I read them one after another, and instead of doing a separate review for each one, I'm going to combine them into one full review.
Needless to say, 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.
