A few weeks before I started at middle school at Rio Norte Jr. High, I read a book called The Lightning Thief. My brother had won it from the Summer Reading Challenge at Barnes & Noble, but my mother, who was an elementary school teacher and who had heard good things about the book, encouraged me to read it, too. At first, I had refused. It seemed like a book for boys. It’s funny, in retrospect. I can’t imagine making that sort of distinction today. But I was twelve years old. I clung to the rigidity of the gender binary because I was aware, on some level, that I did not fit neatly within it, and being abnormal was something I deeply feared.
Eventually, my mom won me over (it was actually the trailer for the Percy Jackson movie that did it—oh, irony of ironies). I read The Lightning Thief a few weeks before the start of the school year, and on my first day at Rio Norte, I went to the library to borrow the second book in the Percy Jackson series, The Sea of Monsters. The next day, I went to check out The Titan’s Curse and The Battle of the Labyrinth. There was some rule that prevented students from checking out multiple books from the same series at once, but the librarian—gods bless her—made an exception. I read a book a day for the rest of the week. By the weekend, I had finished the whole series.
If you had asked me, then, what I liked about Percy Jackson, I would have told you that I liked the adventure and the danger, the funny chapter titles, the magic. I liked Greek mythology, and I liked that I knew the heroes and gods and stories the books referenced. I liked Annabeth Chase, who was tough and determined and smart. I wanted to be a daughter of Athena. I wanted, in every way, to be like Annabeth.
Here’s what I’d tell you now: Percy Jackson is, at its core, about identity. It centers itself around family, around community. It reckons with bloodline and with lineage. Percy Jackson is about finding the parts of the self that matter. It’s about contextualizing the narratives we tell about ourselves. Its protagonists search for belonging and build it themselves when they have to.
I didn’t know I had ADHD when I read Percy Jackson. I wouldn’t receive that diagnosis until I was sixteen years old. But the lack of a diagnosis has little bearing on lived experiences, and much of the “abnormality” I felt and feared I now know were symptoms of my learning differences. There is a certain simple comfort in seeing parts of yourself – those parts you thought were different, strange, unacceptable – in the protagonists of a book. And Percy Jackson teaches us that heroes have ADHD.
Rick Riordan wrote his protagonists with learning differences as a tribute to his son, who, like Percy, was diagnosed with both ADHD and dyslexia. From the start, Riordan was invested in representation. He wanted his son to have heroes, too. Riordan recontextualizes learning differences as superpowers. Percy himself identifies his ADHD as a source of conflict early on in the first book; he at least partially attributes his six-year-long string of school expulsions to his hyperactivity. Yet as soon as he enters the secondary world of Camp Halfblood, his mentor, Chiron, offers him another perspective: ADHD, and hyperactivity especially, keeps demigods alive in a fight. It endows them with supernatural reflexes. Likewise, dyslexia is a side-effect of godly parentage; it is not an inability to read English so much as a mythic predisposition towards Ancient Greek.
The five books that comprise the original Percy Jackson and the Olympians series were published before I turned thirteen, but as I grew up, that universe expanded. In 2010, Rick Riordan released The Red Pyramid, the first book in The Kane Chronicles, a series about Egyptian mythology that exists tangentially to the Percy Jackson books. By the time I graduated from high school in 2015, Percy Jackson had received a sequel in the form of the five-part Heroes of Olympus series. The first books in the Norse mythology series Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard and Trials of Apollo series were released the following year.
Though the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series subscribes to a certain heteronormative hegemony—Riordan continuously equates a happy ending with a heterosexual partnership, with few notable exceptions—its successive series break from that mold. They feature queer heroes: Nico DiAngelo, Will Solace, Lavinia Asimov, Alex Fierro, the god Apollo himself. These are heroes who are gay, who are bisexual, who are lesbian, who are trans. This was what brought me back to Riordan’s work at age 20. I was, by then, a college student, a creative writing major, the vice president of my school’s Queer Straight Alliance. I was long past the need for middle-grade fiction. And yet, I saw, all over again, narratives that felt familiar to me.
There were, at age twelve, so many aspects of my identity that I was oblivious to, so many words I now use to describe myself that I didn’t know at the time: ADHD, lesbian, genderqueer. Yet even when I didn’t have the language to describe them, these experiences resonated with me when I saw them reflected in the media I consumed. It is not a new or radical thing to say that representation matters. Representation normalizes divergent experiences and provides a system for contextualizing and naming them. Percy Jackson mattered to me because identity mattered to me. I found the series at exactly the right time; I was twelve years old, and I had just begun middle school. For me, seventh grade was an in-between year in an in-between place. I was transforming in the rapid way young people transform. I needed books like The Lightning Thief.
But the real gift of the Percy Jackson series is that it continued to be meaningful even as I grew up. As I discovered new aspects of my identity and new ways of being, I saw those experiences reflected in Riordan’s books. It was a shared process of discovery. The series aged with me. I saw myself in those books again and again and again.
Today, I’m a high school English teacher. I have students with learning differences, students who are gay, students who are trans. And I have a long list of books I recommend to my students: novels, short story collections, memoirs, poetry. I recommend the stories I think my students need, the ones that will stay with them as they grow older. Percy Jackson makes that list every time.
Anneliese M. Gelberg (she/her or they/them) is a writer and high school English teacher from Los Angeles, CA. She is a graduate of Eckerd College, where she studied creative writing, and Smith College, where she earned her Master’s in Teaching. Today, Anneliese lives in St. Petersburg, FL and spends most of her time reading, writing, and playing Dungeons & Dragons. She can be found on twitter at @ann3liesemg.
Rick Riordan is the best working middle/young adult writer for readers of any age. All his series have been great, and his new series about Apollo is really, really funny. Apollo’s fatuous and snarky voice kills me in every book.
Interesting. I was a very femme little girl, refused to wear pants, hated sports, etc. But reading Boys books never bothered me at all.
I was all grown up, indeed middle aged, when I read the Percy Jackson series. I rather went off Heroes of Olympus because Riordan made a major mistake in Roman religion. Minerva was a very important Roman goddess, one of the Capitoline Triumvirate with Jupiter and Juno. She had her own temple in Rome too and a five day festival so it really was a huge mistake for Riordan to downgrade her, though no doubt it made good literary sense.
Rick Riordan’s adult mysteries are some of my favorite books, so when my nieces and nephews were reading the Percy Jackson books, I tried them, too. As a myth-geek, I SO wanted to like them. Unfortunately, I couldn’t really get past his tendency to keep things secret from the reader that didn’t need to be for the sake of “suspense” (a huge pet peeve of mine. A good story doesn’t need such fake writerly tricks.) But this perspective about representation in the books makes me want to try again, maybe with some of his later series…
I think I was already in college when The Lightning Thief was released, but years later I picked up a copy at a garage sale and raced through it; my eleven-year-old self would have loved it!
I’ve been reading Rick Riordan’s mythology-based series since just after The Sea of Monsters came out, when I was in third grade. I have a lot of the same feelings about them as you did, first connecting with Annabeth and the ways that Percy and his friends have to deal with their differences in neurodivergence and family situations as both obstacles and benefits.
As the series expanded, so did my experience of the world.
The Titan’s Curse was one of the first books I read where deaths happened to important characters and really mattered – and not for the purpose of the main character’s personal development or the sake of the plot. They were there because death is something that happens, and not just to old people and not because anything you did was wrong or because you need to grow. Sometimes people make choices and you just have to live with what happens afterwards, and make the best of the journey you still have left to go.
With Battle of the Labyrinth, Riordan allowed his readers to explore the experience of grief. Not many adventure books for middle-grade readers have grief as part of their exploration, but Riordan makes it the focus of the main characters and the main plot. And by doing so, he allowed his readers to understand the complexities of what it means to be a person in a complex world – how grief can make someone despondent or rageful or unfocused or sharp; how lashing out in pain doesn’t make you a bad person, and helping someone out doesn’t necessarily make you good; how happiness and pain can come right after the other; how gods and heroes can be broken and fail; how your enemies can sometimes save the day; and how pursuing your goals can make or break the world, but how it’s always important for you to do so. And that sometimes the most important thing is to be yourself.
In The Last Olympian, Riordan brought everything he taught in the first four books together into a fitting finale, that elevated each of the messages from the previous books and focused on the importance of found family and personal relationships. It was an ending to a series and the beginning of something much more, just like the place that I was in in my life when I read it – the summer between elementary school and middle school.
In Riordan’s following series, he continued to expand the horizons and take into account more perspectives outside the norms of the city/suburban white New Yorkers that much of Percy Jackson was placed in. Heroes of Olympus and Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard did the most to break this mold, with Heroes focusing on a main cast that included characters like Leo Valdez, Frank Zhang, Hazel Levesque, and Reyna Avila Ramírez-Arellano, and Magnus Chase focusing on a somehow-even-more-diverse cast of characters than that.
For me, Magnus Chase‘s inclusion of the character of Alex Fierro is perhaps my favourite thing that Rick Riordan has done. Alex is one of the most well-written and realistic trans/non-binary/genderfluid characters I’ve seen written, especially by someone who isn’t (as far as I know) one of the above. As a genderfluid trans girl myself, Alex was a character I really connected with and appreciated as a reader, especially as Riordan progressively wrote the interactions between Alex and Magnus (and between Alex and Sam) increasingly complexly and intimately as the series went along. The expressions of Alex’s traumas and defense mechanisms were both well-written and important (not-to-mention something I connected with), especially in a series specifically focusing on themes of self-worth, familial trauma, found family, and love.
Also, just putting this out there: Riordan’s description of the first time Magnus meets Alex is by far the best introduction to a trans/non-binary/genderfluid character I have seen in anything.
I can’t wait to see what Riordan’s next series in this ever-expanding world of mythology-infused emotional realism will bring.
I read all of the books already lol
At my daughter’s first PRIDE parade I was explaining what each of the letters in LGBTQ stood for and what the terms meant. When we got to T, she stopped me and said, “Oh, like Alex Fierro”. She was 8. Riordan is by far her favorite author and she makes connections from his writing to life experiences all the time.
@@@@@Nausicaa_of_Ereshkigal Thank you so much for writing your post. My DD loves these books and though I have seen the movies and thought they were good, I now understand why she loves them so.
I only wish I had found these books when I was 12-13 years old, because it would have made my world so much brighter so much earlier! I read these books when I was 18-19, and I have to tell you that these books are not age bound. no matter what age I will read them at, I will love them. I’ve read them at 18, at 20, and at 24. Still makes me lose myself in them. it’s true – reading those books, I was able to write about the identities of my characters so much more clearly – I used to write characters as the sum of their actions instead of what they liked, looked like, ate, sang, listened to – I started paying attention towards my own characters, and Rick – Rick is full of life messages as well as writing tips.
I first read these books before the fourth one was released; I found The Lightning Thief in the library after school when I was about 14. I enjoyed them so much and they were definitely part of what inspired me to study Ancient History at university. But then they have grown so far beyond that enjoyable adventure story with wonderful characters. I have loved watching these books gain popularity and seeing the stories grow not just with me, but with the world around us. I still re-read them and seek out the new ones (despite being well out of the target age range) and Annabeth will always be up there with my favourite characters of all time. They’re so simple yet so clever and so meaningful. Even reading this article and the comments, it’s amazing the different things that people have taken away – the sign of a truly great story. And it’s not just a good story, it’s the whole Rick Riordan universe – I have so much respect for him.
This article is really well-written, and it resonates strongly with me. When I first read the books I also loved the action and adventure. I loved the world-building of Camp Half Blood and liked that the protagonists had flaws as well as strengths.
And then I grew up, and discovered an enduring love for Nico di Angelo’s character arc, and the dimension he brought to the series. The books were already great – but I’d say that representation, and the other characters that followed, made them even better.