Reviews with content warning for Torture - The Lightning Thief

This is actually my first time reading the Percy Jackson series and I was so excited because of it. The first book, The Lighting Thief, was fun to read but I just noticed that I’m just not the target audience and that it’s definitely MG and not YA.

In this novel, we’re introduced into the world of the Camp Half Blood Chronicles. Percy Jackson is a normal boy until he’s attacked by a fury and learns that he’s a demigod who has to learn to use his abilities at Camp Half Blood. There, he’s accused of stealing Zeus’ master bolt and only has a limited amount of time to find it and the real culprit. On this mission, he gets help from his new friends Grover and Annabeth.

The story is told in a quite fast pace which I enjoyed; there are barely any moments where it slows down which is also the effect of the (kinda artificial) time pressure. Additionally, the action scenes are great, especially the final fight, even though I’m not the biggest fan of monster fights. Of course, the story has some clichés, like Percy being the only child of Poseidon in camp or

his mother not actually being dead

I’m still not sure what to think about the integration of Greek mythology into modern books. I don’t like how violent and disturbing it can get, but those parts are mostly left out in The Lighting Thief. In contrast, I always enjoy seeing mythological people and creatures in modern settings. The idea with the summer camp is also so nice and just something different from a boarding school, even though I always love those. What I additionally liked as well was the American setting. The humour obviously is a bit more childish and sometimes feels a bit out of time, e.g. making fun of overweight people, but some moments were even funny to me.

The strength of this series are definitely its characters who are all so amazing, lovable, and honestly quite diverse considering the fact that this book was released in 2005. Percy, Grover, and Annabeth are all such great characters and I liked them quite a lot. It was especially cute to see how their friendship started to bloom. Another character I really liked was Luke but

he sadly has to be the bad guy, oh well

. What annoyed me a bit though were some of the cliché characters used, like the terrible and mean stepfather or the mean girls like Clarisse, but this luckily changes in the later novels. I also had the feeling that Percy’s feelings weren’t always portrayed so well; for example, when

his mother apparently died

, he barely had any emotional reaction to it.

I’m pretty sure I would’ve loved The Lighting Thief as a child but the original German cover scared me back then for some reasons lmao. Now being an adult, I had fun reading this novel but there was not much more to it. Still, I can’t wait to find out how the series will continue.

Content Warnings