PJO Reread: The Lightning Thief

This book holds up seriously well. I enjoyed every minute of it, the humor is amazing and the pacing is great. The references to "western civilization" being destroyed made me cringe, though, and I felt like the Crusty's Waterbed Palace scene was really unnecessary and didn't really add much to the story. Having the characters escape from the Lotus Casino, almost get to the underworld, and then get in a 5 minute fight (when all the other fights with greek myth cameos lasted quite a bit longer) before reaching their destination kinda felt weird to me. 

The twist ending of Luke betraying Percy and the rest of the camp ALWAYS has me gasping dramatically like I'm in a soap opera. The emotional impact of it is still there even though I knew it was coming.

Percy and Annabeth's chemistry is soooo good, even this early in their friendship/relationship. Riordan knew exactly what he was doing by making their godly parents rivals. Their bickering and head-butting is definitely going to make the eventual romance between them so much more rewarding! Percy and Grover also have a really realistic and adorable friendship, I loved seeing them really understand each other and lean on each other for support and encouragement!

This book also does an excellent job introducing most of the concepts and rules of the Riordanverse (If you told middle school me how big this fictional world was now, I'd have shat my pants). It lays it out for you really clearly without being boring!

All-in-all, there's definitely a reason I was obsessed with this series in middle school, and that's because it's legitimately fucking good (and also because I had undiagnosed ADHD and related to Percy a lot because of that). I can excuse a lot of the cringey outdated bits cause it was published all the way back in 2005. This book gets extra points for Percy and Sally doxxing and murdering their abuser, respectively. Smelly Gabe had it coming!