Demigods and Monsters by Rick Riordan; Leah Wilson

Author:Rick Riordan; Leah Wilson
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Myths, Riordan, Fables, Legends, Action & Adventure, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Fantasy Fiction, Juvenile Fiction, History and Criticism, Children's Literature, General, Greek & Roman, American, Literary Criticism, American - History and Criticism, Children's Stories, Rick - Criticism and Interpretation, Juvenile Literature, Short Stories
ISBN: 9781933771830
Publisher: Smart Pop
Published: 2008-01-01T06:00:00+00:00

Percy, I Am Your Father

Sarah Beth Durst

At one time or another, who hasn’

t wanted to

assign their parents a letter grade? “I’

m sorry,

Mom, but you get an F for not letting me go to that party.” Or, “Dad, good job showing up for my baseball game. You get a B+.” Sarah Beth Durst takes us on a tour of the good, the bad, and the really bad parents of the Percy Jackson series. One word of warning: If you give your godly parent a failing grade, don’

tell him or her. You’

t

re liable to wind up as a

tree or a smoking crater.

Note to self: Do not become a parent in a fantasy novel.

Seriously, have you ever noticed how disturbingly often parents in fantasy novels are dead, kidnapped, missing, clueless, distant, or unknown? Kind of makes me want to round up all the authors, sit them on those pleather psychiatrist couches, and say,

“Now, tell me about your mother . . .”

On the other hand, it works very nicely as a storytelling device: Get the parents out of the way and then something interesting can 93

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DEMIGODS AND MONSTERS

happen. I think of it as the Home Alone technique. You see it in books by C. S. Lewis, Lemony Snicket, J. K. Rowling . . . and you definitely see it in Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians series. All the kids at Camp Half-Blood, including the protagonist Percy, are separated from their parents.

But are the parents really gone from the story? True, they don’t have much screen time, but in Rick Riordan’s books, the influence of these seldom-seen parents is so profound as to be (brace yourself—

there’s a pun coming) mythic.

The parents in the Percy Jackson books run the gamut from very cool to extremely evil. To facilitate our discussion of them, I’d like to introduce: Sarah’s Sliding Scale of Parenting Skills.

Okay, so it’s not actually a sliding scale. It’s more of a report card.

But that just doesn’t have the same ring to it. After all, what’s more important: accurate use of vocabulary or catchy alliteration? Don’t answer that.

Worst Parent Award (Grade = Instant Expulsion) Let’s begin with the worst of the worst, the absolute bottom of Sarah’s Sliding Scale of Parenting Skills, the parent who is so bad that he has won the Worst Parent Award for three millennia in a row. (Several years running, he also won Worst Dressed too, when he showed up to the awards ceremony in bell bottoms and suspenders. . . . Okay, I’m just making that up. Dionysus always wins Worst Dressed for his tiger-stripe Hawaiian shirts.) The recipient of this award is directly responsible for the central conflict of the Percy Jackson series. If he had cultivated better relationships with his children, the entire series would have been different. He is the Big Bad, the primary villain. He’s also a lousy father.

I’m not talking didn’t-attend-his-daughter’s-piano-recital lousy, or even forgot-to-pick-the-kid-up-from-soccer-practice lousy. No, this paragon of parental virtue began his parenting career by eating his own children.

PERCY, I AM YOUR FATHER

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Yes, that’s right.

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