Hello everyone!
Actually I'm in this kind of mood a lot, I guess.
Riordan writes the types of books I enjoy reading to turn my brain off and just enjoy the story, the characters and the humour, and I have to admit that it's nice to revisit them every once in a while.
I've been making my way through the Olympians series a little while ago and then let the rest of the books just sit there, but then last week I was like, you know what? Why the heck not.
Which was why I ended up picking up the Heroes of Olympus one more time.
Despite the fact I have mixed feelings about the sequel series, I still enjoy the story as a whole.
And then of course, if you're reading the main stories, you have to read the companion books as well, which brings me to this week's subject.
I suppose I've waited long enough to get this going, so here we are: Percy Jackson's Greek Heroes are up next!
You'll find a whole bunch of Riordan-related links right down at the bottom of this page, as per usual, and I will absolutely recommend that you read at least his Percy Jackson and the Olympians series on your own to decide for yourself whether you like it or not.
Me, I'm a definite fan of Percy Jackson, so I thoroughly enjoy the two companion books, as well.
A long time ago I reviewed Percy Jackson's Greek Gods, but our favourite Demigod actually took a look at the others like him who suffered through the history of Ancient Greece, and his "publisher" really, really liked what they got for the price of their bribe.
Which means we'll totally like the end result, too.
See, gods always need heroes to complete some task or other and to work their divine purpose through them. Percy (or well, Riordan) chose a dozen or so of those that are easily the most recognizable for us to delve into, so let's stop puttering about and make sure we're wearing our anti-death ray coats. Weapons included!
We start the story with Perseus, the hero that Percy Jackson is actually named after - because guess what? This guy LIVES. Trust me, in comparison to pretty much everyone else, that's a massive accomplishment. As a son of Zeus he gets packed into a box and shipped out to sea because his mortal father believes he'll take over the kingdom and kill him - so naturally, when Perseus grows up and goes on to kill Medusa, he wins himself a princess, returns home, and definitely does exactly what he was prophecized to do, though he does it by the most obscure way, hitting the old king with a disk at some competition.
Woohoo! Happily ever after.
Which our second story is also about, though it takes a whole lot of time, effort and pain to get there. See, Psyche is the most beautiful princess in the kingdom, so beautiful that no mortal dares to marry her, and eventually, as people compare her to Aphrodite, the goddess wants to punish her. The only thing that saves her is that Eros, Aphrodite's son, falls in love with the girl and rescues her, but she's not supposed to ever look on his face or else they're in trouble. Naturally it's what she does, so then she has to complete terrible labours to win his love again, nearly dying at the end until Eros himself intervenes and demands that Zeus makes her a goddess.
Seeing as the big guy is kind of worried Eros might make him fall in love with a totem pole next, he does as he's asked.
But that's basically two happy endings in a row, so how about we have a look at Phaethon, who should have known better than to be a silly student driver? See, the kid was a demigod son of Helios, the sun god, but nobody believed him and he was always bullied about, so he went to find his dad so that he could prove to everyone just who he really was. He chose pretty much the stupidest way to do it though, demanding to drive the sun chariot - and because he had no clue how to do it, he burned half the world and froze the other half, until Zeus knocked him out of the sky with a lightning bolt, making him a permanent glowy ornament at the bottom of a lake.
And after that, Apollo took over from Helios as sun good.
In the meantime, Otrera was doing her own thing, aka killing the men in her village for being impossible to their women, and founding the kingdom of Amazons, because what else are you going to do with your spare time, am I right? She had a couple of daughters with the war god, Ares, and eventually retired, though history doesn't really know how or why. Her daughters weren't all that lucky though - one tangled with Hercules, and the other died in the Trojan war. Each time, the gods were messing with their lives, so I mean ... who would WANT to be a demigod?
Not Daedalus, who was probably the smartest person to ever walk the planet, inventing just about anything, until he got jealous of his nephew and killed him, which made Athena curse the man and he wandered from place to place, most notably to Crete, where he was partially responsible for the Minotaur and DEFINITELY responsible for the Labyrinth, and then on to Italy before he disappeared from knowledge after his son Icarus croaked for being, well, too ADHD - we all know the story of the wings, after all.
And if we're talking ADHD, nobody's the poster child for that more than Theseus, who was the son of Poseidon and grew up in secret just outside of Athens before he returned there to whoop the butts of the fifty or so other pretenders for the throne (his cousins, I believe) and only THEN - after making side-trips to deal with other monsters around - did he go to Crete and kill the Minotaur, taking the two princesses with him. Of course then he turned into a jerk, dumped Ariadne and married her sister, and eventually found himself frozen in place in the Underworld for trying to be a dummy and help a buddy of his steal Persephone (he himself kind of stole Helen of Troy, but she returned home anyway).
So as you can see, demigods were kind of cursed. They also needed to be boys, otherwise they ended up like Atalanta, who was left in the wilderness to die because her dad wanted a son. She grew up instead though, and eventually returned to her kingdom to hold races to the death for any potential suitor who wanted to win her hand. One did in the end - by tricking her with three bewitched apples, though that didn't guarantee them a happily ever after, either. They kind of got carried away and Zeus turned them into a pair of lions. Yay?
But at least they weren't like Bellerophon, who basically did everything by accident, from being a hero to killing people. He was sent to atone for his sins, but when he didn't want to deal with the queen she asked her father to kill the insolent whelp. Her dad saw his use, however, and had him defeat all sorts of monsters (like the Chimera), and eventually he married the other daughter. He's the hero who tamed Pegasus too, by the way - and tried flying onto Mount Olympus, before Zeus invented the gadfly and the horse tossed Bellerophon to his death.
Which sounds painful, because it was. Cyrene's death wasn't, luckily for us, because while she captured the attention of not one, but TWO gods - Apollo and Ares, the most unlikely combination imaginable - she ended up turned into a nymph of the river she lived by after Apollo transplanted her to northern Africa. So I suppose, after having kids with two gods, that's actually a pretty nifty way to retire!
It's definitely better than what happened to Orpheus, the world's best singer and magician who even got the lyre from Apollo for making the god cry. See, he got married alright, but his wife died from a snake bite during their honeymoon, and he journeyed into the Underworld to save her. He failed the ultimate test in the end though, because he turned around to see if she was behind him before they were both fully outside in the sun, and lost her for a second time. He went on to journey with the Argonauts but in the end died at the hands of Dionysus' crazy followers, happy to be released from his mortal bonds.
You know who was almost never happy though? Hercules. Persecuted all his life by Hera, he completed twelve labours he became famous for, married two times as a mortal, and died that second time because his silly wife believed that he was going to divorce her (newsflash: he wasn't). After death, Zeus made him immortal and he married the goddess Hebe, becoming the guardian to the entrance of Olympus.
And in the end we wrap up with the Argonaut himself - Jason, who had to retrieve the Golden Fleece (which happened to be a flying ram for a time, a son of Poseidon, somehow) and only THEN could he become king. Which he did, but he also brought back Medea while he was at it, which didn't end so well for him because the sorceress was very death-happy, and they were driven out of every kingdom they came to because of her magic (and the death that followed her). In the end though, Jason made the ultimate mistake by wanting to divorce her, which prompted her to kill not only his future new wife, but her own two sons she had by him, and he had to flee once more. He died miserable and alone, his fame forgotten by pretty much everyone, even his fellow Argonauts.
So there you go! Feeling heroic yet? I sincerely hope not, because this all sounds like a massive pain in the butt, but Riordan knows Percy's voice so well that it's really funny to read the misadventures with his running commentary alongside (along the lines of 'you can't swing a cat without hitting a son of Zeus in Greece').
Like the book about the gods, this one doesn't try to show things in a better light or anything - it just shows the truth, and that's something we can all appreciate.
It also brings mythology closer to younger generations, which is a massive bonus, so if you liked what you read here head on out and find out more about the gods, and the heroes whose lives they made miserable!
Or you can always check out Riordan's other books, of course. That's definitely an option.
xx
*image not mine
No comments:
Post a Comment