When I was 8 years-old, my friend Megan traded me a book called The Dolphin Rider (for, I think, something from my extensive Babysitters’ Club collection). Written by Bernard Evslin, whom I later learnt was something of an expert in the field, it was a sanitized, chapter-book retelling of some of the more famous Greek myths.

I fell completely in love with the Pantheon within the soon dog-eared pages of that venerable tome -- a love that continues to this day. My bookshelf has its own Mythology section that contains an original edition of The Golden Bough that could buy me a car and more translations of The Iliad than one person really requires. (Including a graphic novel version that I shall treasure forever.)

So when another friend, Sophia, told me about a book series starring my beloved Olympian gods (I hesitate to admit how many years later), I was immediately intrigued. When she added it was Young Adult – basically, latter-day Harry Potter, but with vengeful, spiteful deities – I was convinced. I made myself a date with Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, the first in the series.

It went well.

Oh, I wouldn’t say I was as gripped by the adventures of young Perseus as I was of his wizardly contemporary. But I will say that the inclusion of myriad Greek mythological creatures, constructs and conquerors lends this series something that J. K. Rowling’s power-infused kid lacks: senseless, mindless evil. Evil for its own sake. Black and white old school evil with whom you cannot sympathize or empathize, even if you find out they had a troubled family life or a hard time at school. Greek myths often lack shades of gray – it was a simpler time, all those millennia ago – yet they also have endured for so very long because they speak to the very core of the very primitive part of our brains that urges us to seek and destroy all that is different and disgusting. In Greek mythology -- as in most fantasy and a lot of science fiction -- evil is often really, really ugly. That’s how you can tell it is evil, and that’s why in the rare cases where evil masquerades as beauty (from Circe and the Sirens to the White Queen and The Baroness), it often seems even worse. It’s just so… dishonest. How could they lie to us like that, them with their lovely faces and yet dark, dark souls? That’s just so evil… ah. Never mind.

Back to Percy. He and the Lightning Thief finds our young hero a 12-year old dyslexic and ADHD sufferer attending a private New York academy for troubled youth. Percy has a best-friend, Grover, a favorite teacher, Mr. Brunner, and has somehow accrued the wrath of his Math teacher, Mrs. Dodds, for no clear reason. The reason soon becomes clear, however, when Mrs. Dodds is revealed to be a harpy! A winged, taloned, shrieking harpy, who accuses the bewildered Percy of stealing “it,” whom Percy then runs through with a miraculous bronze sword.

Confused and thinking himself mad, it is only later that Percy learns the truth. He’s the son of a god! No one’s saying which one, exactly, but he soon learns it’s Poseidon, god of the Sea, who has totally broken the rules. As one of the Big Three, the Pantheon’s most powerful gods, Poseidon wasn’t supposed to have any human… uh… issues. But here he is, Perseus Jackson, and when he meets up with his fellow demigods (of which there are legion; the Greek gods are just as libidinous in the Modern Age as they were in the Ancient, though one hopes there’s less turning-into-animals-and-doing-it nowadays), Percy discovers that he’s Prophecy Boy. He then spends the rest of the series tumbling from one emergency Save the World mission to the next, with the aid of a few very special friends, like Grover (the satyr), Annabeth (daughter of Athena), Clarisse (daughter of Ares), and many others. But Percy’s name is in the book titles for a reason; this is a story about him, about his trials and tribulations and cool water-controlling abilities; about what it is like to come to grips with the utterly fantastical and impossible in what was previously a very ordinary life; about how it feels to have destiny thrust upon you, and how one goes about making that destiny for oneself.

See? These books are deep.

They are also an excellent primer to the field of comparative religion for youngsters (and not so youngsters) everywhere. That Greek mythology was once a true religion is hard for some to grasp, especially those from any largely monotheist culture; when gods show up in a Disney cartoon, it’s hard to take them at all seriously. Percy Jackson and the Olympians, however, shows that Ancient belief as it once was: the dominant religion of its time. What Passion of the Christ (and those Stephen Baldwin movies) do for Christian doctrine, and those Scientology “documentaries” do for L. Ron Hubbard, Riordan does for the Pantheon. And while Riordan’s series is clearly fantasy, and no one is suggesting that kids should renounce Sunday School and go build temples to Zeus instead (plus, let’s please avoid all the human sacrifice, shall we?), Percy Jackson is, at the very least, a mind-expanding lesson in tolerance and understanding of other cultures’ philosophies. In Ancient Greece, The Bible would have been the equivalent of Homer, the Qur’an that of Herodotus. Percy Jackson makes that point ably, without belaboring it. If for no other reason, I would love it just for that.

But there are other reasons. One, in particular, and I won’t deny it. For all its grand, sweeping themes, when it comes right down to it, the Percy Jackson series is your classic I’m So Special, After All tale, in which the central character Saves the Day. (Or, in Percy’s case, several Days.) He’s the ordinary kid who finds himself an extraordinary hero, and that is really what makes Percy Jackson so enjoyable. He goes on quest after quest, comes up against monster after monster, and emerges triumphant. In the course of five books he manages to set all to rights in the Olympian realm, and in the process, save the world, too. He gets the glory, gets the girl, and totally gets the gods to do what he says.

Well, sure. But it’s not like he stopped Voldemort, or anything.

  -- Rachel Hyland