The Titan’s Curse Percy Jackson Book 3
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The Titan’s Curse –
When the goddess Artemis goes missing, she is believed to have been kidnapped. And now it’s up to Percy and his friends to find out what happened. Who is powerful enough to kidnap a goddess?
The Titan’s Curse Percy Jackson Book 3 (Review)
Ancient Greek mythology must be one of the most richly mined seams in the arts. The Romans liked the deities so much they bought the assembled company. Everyone from painters to poets has interpreted, reinterpreted, borrowed, distorted and generally plundered the immortals, half-gods and mere mortals who suffered as pawns in the gods' endless games, not forgetting the menagerie of fantastical monsters they all faced. Our language is littered with references to these familiar tales: the Midas touch, the sword of Damocles, a Sisyphean task, an Achilles heel, a Trojan horse. And such stories have been firm favourites with children too. Many of us were brought up on a staple diet of Sinbad and other movies of that ilk, with Ray Harryhausen's glorious stop-frame animation monsters somehow more frightening and more monstery than their computer-generated counterparts.
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Then there were Roger Lancelyn Green's retellings of these myths and legends, and mesmerising tales such as CS Lewis's short story "Forms of Things Unknown", which had Gorgons on the moon. Those ancient Greek creations got everywhere.
And now we have the bestselling Percy Jackson stories by the American author Rick Riordan, of which this is the third. Percy is Perseus, a demi-god or "half-blood": his father is Poseidon, god of the sea, and his mother a mere mortal. His ballpoint pen becomes his trusty sword, his watch his shield. He's a 21st-century teenage hero.
But how can the stuff of such legends translate to modern settings? Very well, it seems. Take Apollo, for example. He explains that he and Artemis are sun god and moon god, due to downsizing. The Romans "couldn't afford all those temple sacrifices, so they laid off Helios and Selene and folded their duties into our job description". As for the dilemma that the sun has proven to be a big fiery ball of gas rather than a chariot driven across the sky, Apollo has a comeback for that too: "it depends on whether you're talking astronomy or philosophy . . . This chariot is a manifestation of the sun's power, the way mortals perceive it." Does that make sense? No? "Well then, just think of it as a really powerful, really dangerous solar car."
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So it's funny, but it's also very exciting, with the gods behaving in that disgraceful and unpredictable way that gods do. Then there are the really bad guys. If you're familiar with these ancient characters, you'll be impressed by how Riordan handles them. If they're new to you, it's a gripping introduction.
By choosing this approach, Riordan also gets around a perennial problem fantasy writers have when conjuring up monsters: new ones are often pale imitations of those that have been around for thousands of years. Percy Jackson gets to face the oldies but goldies, the original greats, in some very exciting encounters. Sure Chiron, the good guy Centaur - half human/half horse in appearance - sleeps with curlers in his tail, but there's plenty of page-turning action as those from Camp Half-Blood (which includes Artemis's band of teenage-girl hunters) face the threat of Titans, the "old gods".
The cover nearly put me off before I'd even started, though it may be what draws some children to the book in the first place - it includes a skeleton in combat gear, and a bottle of tomato ketchup - but it's the storytelling that will get readers hooked. After all, this is the stuff of legends.
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