Unlike Ares with Clarisse, Poseidon does acknowledge and compliment Percy. More than that, his dad vouches for him and places an enormous amount of trust in him, betting that his son won’t turn evil and destroy the world. (Okay, for most parents, this isn’t really a stretch, but gods have to worry about stuff like that.) He also manages to show up at Percy’s birthday party in The Battle of the Labyrinth, despite being in the middle of an ocean war, and tells Percy he’s his favorite son. As Percy recounts, “He smiled, and at that moment, just being in the kitchen with him was the best birthday present I ever got.” Hmm . . . maybe Poseidon should really be upgraded to a B. The only thing that keeps him from a higher score is that fact that he left his son Tyson (the Cyclops) to live on the streets of New York in a cardboard refrigerator box. Granted, he later grants Tyson’s prayers by giving him Percy as a brother and finding him gainful employment. . . . Okay, he’s a C+, but with some grade grubbing, Poseidon could move up the Scale of Parenting Skills to a B-grade parent.
Hermes is another C-grade parent who also has the potential to move up the Scale of Skills. His heart is in the right place: He wants to save his son Luke. Luke has turned out rather badly. Possibly due to lack of parental guidance, he has fallen in with a bad crowd. The evil Titan Lord who wants to overthrow civilization can’t be a good influence on a still-forming mind. (I keep thinking there should be some kind of Public Service Announcement: Don’t smoke, don’t drink, don’t plot world destruction with the aid of ancient mythological monsters. . . .) But despite Luke’s dastardly deeds, Hermes refuses to give up on his son. “My dear young cousin,” he says to Percy in The Sea of Monsters, “if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the eons, it’s that you can’t give up on your family, no matter how tempting they make it.” Hermes hopes that Luke will notice his attempts to help him, but he hasn’t had any luck yet.
Luke clearly has father issues. (Seriously, just look at his boat—it’s named after Andromeda, a girl who was chained to a rock by her parents to be eaten by sea serpents. Talk about family problems.) You see his bitterness about his father right from the first time Percy meets him in The Lightning Thief, and that bitterness fuels his betrayal of Percy in book one, his actions on behalf of Kronos in book two, his role in Annabeth’s imprisonment in book three, and his donation of his body for use by our chief bad guy. So even though we only see him for a few scattered pages throughout the series, and even though he means well, Hermes is also the driving force behind Luke’s destructive behavior.
Another so-so parent-god is Athena, Annabeth’s mother. We don’t see her much in the first four books. She does help out her daughter on occasion—she gave Annabeth her cap of invisibility (hey, that’s what I should ask my mom to get me for Christmas!), and she gives Percy advice while on his quest to save Annabeth in The Titan’s Curse. But she’s not exactly having mother-daughter pizza nights with her. I’d rate her a flat C. She’s a neutral force in Annabeth’s life.
Zeus is a low C. Yes, he saves his daughter Thalia from death by transforming her into a pine tree, but is life as a tree really such great shakes? Couldn’t he have intervened a wee bit sooner or more effectively? How about turning her enemies into trees? (I know, I know, no direct interference, but isn’t he already breaking the rule with the tree-transformation thing?) He also supplies angels to help our heroes escape from the skeleton warriors at Hoover Dam, but he’s not so quick to answer her other prayers (for instance, in The Titan’s Curse, she prays for a thunderstorm with no more effect than my chanting “rain, rain, go away . . .”). So he’s there for her when things are at their most dire, but he’s not a day-to-day kind of dad.
It doesn’t make for a built-on-trust kind of relationship. When lightning nearly hits her in The Titan’s Curse, Thalia thinks her dad is trying to kill her, but it’s actually Kronos using her parental hang-ups to try to manipulate her. Dr. Thorn later tries to lure her to Kronos’s side by talking about how her father abandoned her, and Luke gets her to hesitate by mentioning her dad. To be fair, Zeus does acknowledge and compliment her at the end of the quest—more than just “Hi, kid. Nice hair.” But his unreliability makes Thalia a wild card for much of book three, so that’s not enough to boost Zeus to the next grade level.
One thing that can be said about these C-grade parents: They at least sometimes try. They don’t always succeed, but at least they occasionally care. “Families are messy,” Hermes says in The Sea of Monsters. “Immortal families are eternally messy. Sometimes the best we can do is to remind each other that we’re related, for better or worse . . . and try to keep the maiming and killing to a minimum.”
Most Improved (Grade = B)
The Most Improved Parent of the Year Award belongs to Dr. and Mrs. Chase, Annabeth’s father and stepmother. When Annabeth talks about her dad and stepmom in The Lightning Thief, she is far from complimentary. She complains that they treated her like a freak who endangered her stepsiblings and made her feel so unwanted that she ran away. She paints them as such ogres that when Percy meets her stepmom in book three, he says, “I half expected Mrs. Chase to turn into a raving lunatic at the mention of her stepdaughter, but she just pursed her lips and looked concerned.”
Clearly the Chases failed in some way to connect with their daughter, or else she wouldn’t have run away at age seven and been nearly squashed by the bad guys—tough to get a perfect score on Sarah’s Scale of Parenting Skill with that on your record—but I think Annabeth is wrong about them. Think about it: Whenever she’s home, monsters attack. Can you blame her parents for being a wee bit tense around her? Other kids bring home problems with bullies or grades or smoking, but heroes bring home problems with teeth, claws, swords, and way too many arms. You don’t find info on how to deal with that in any parenting advice book (“Just say no to monsters!” “I don’t care if that hellhound followed you home, you can’t keep it unless you promise to walk it every day . . .”). Despite this, the Chases keep trying. At the end of The Lightning Thief, Annabeth takes Percy’s advice and writes a letter to her dad. He responds instantly with an invitation for her to move back home. Give the man a gold star.
In The Titan’s Curse, Dr. Chase takes “trying” to a whole new level. When Annabeth is kidnapped and her friends need transportation to reach her, Percy and Thalia turn to Dr. Chase for help. Dr. Chase and Mrs. Chase loan them a car without much argument. In fact, Dr. Chase wants to do more, but Percy and Thalia refuse. As they leave, Mrs. Chase tells them to tell Annabeth she still has a home with them. But that’s not the last of it. Just when things are bleakest, Dr. Chase flies in on his plane, machine guns down the monsters, and saves the day.
I think all the parenting advice books would agree: Gunning down an army of evil monsters to save your daughter’s life is good parenting.
Best Parent Award (Grade = A)
And the envelope, please. . . . Winner of the award for Best Parent in the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series is . . . Sally Jackson! [Insert sound effect of wild applause. Sally smiles, waves shyly at the audience, and makes her way to the stage. Her son Percy toasts her with a cobalt blue Cherry Coke.]
Sally loves her son. She is willing to sacrifice her happiness for his safety. As Percy learns in The Lightning Thief, she married the odious Smelly Gabe in order to protect Percy from the monsters who hunt half-bloods—or at least that’s Grover’s theory: “Gabe has been covering your scent for years. If you hadn’t lived with him every summer, you probably would’ve been found by monsters a long time ago. Your mom stayed with him to protect you. She was a smart lady. She must’ve loved you a lot to put up with that guy.” (Given Sally’s previous taste in men, I’m inclined to believe Grover. Plus, as soon as Percy proves he doesn’t need protection, Sally rids herself of Gabe, and finds the much-nicer Paul.) Regardless, Sally does her best to give Percy a normal life for as long as possible. Okay, yes, she nearly gets him killed by not sending him to Camp Half-Blood sooner (details, details). She makes up for it by insisting that he
leave her and save himself when the Minotaur attacks. He doesn’t, of course (again, details).
She also scores extra points for sheer coolness. Look at the beginning of The Titan’s Curse: “The Friday before winter break, my mom packed me an overnight bag and a few deadly weapons and took me to a new boarding school.” Unlike parents in other fantasy stories who either are an impediment to or are ignorant of their child’s responsibilities as Chosen One (or superhero or nice vampire or whatever), Percy’s mom drives him and his hero friends to battle.
Instead of blocking her son’s heroics, Sally encourages him. She pushes him to defy the camp director (who incidentally is a god, so this is no trivial act) and rescue his friend Annabeth in The Titan’s Curse. “As much as I want you to come home,” she says, “as much as I want you to be safe, I want you to understand something. You need to do whatever you think you have to. . . . I’m telling you that I’ll support you, even if what you decide to do is dangerous.” Okay, how awesome is that? Just for that statement, I think Sally Jackson deserves Best Parent in a Fantasy Series Ever. Seriously, name one other parent in a fantasy novel who says something like this. (Um, that’s a rhetorical dare. Please don’t go research it. Point is that it’s unusual.) And she doesn’t just say it once, she repeats the sentiment in The Battle of the Labyrinth after Percy and Annabeth tell her Percy’s plan to navigate the Labyrinth. She loves him, she trusts him, and she supports his decision to face mortal peril.
Percy loves her too. The very first time he describes her, he says, “She’s the best person in the world.” He treasures his memories of summers spent on the beach in Montauk, and his favorite taste in the world is her homemade blue chocolate chip cookies. (She has an obsession with blue food. But really, who doesn’t?) He misses her while he’s at school and at camp. About fifty pages into the first novel, during the fight with the Minotaur, Sally dissolves into shimmering golden light (ooh, shiny!). Percy believes she’s been killed, and he accepts the quest to retrieve Zeus’ master bolt from Hades in the hopes of bringing her back to life. He says point-blank to Grover, “I don’t care about the master bolt. I agreed to go to the Underworld so I could bring back my mother.” Percy is willing to travel to hell and back (literally) for his mother. He loves her so much that when the Oracle prophecies that he will “fail to save what matters most in the end,” he knows this means his mother, but he hopes to hell (sorry—couldn’t resist the pun) that the Oracle is wrong and continues on anyway. His love for his mother inspires the quest that drives the entire plot of The Lightning Thief.
His devotion isn’t exactly news to the other characters. Ares successfully dangles information about Percy’s mother as bait to lure Percy into a trap, and Hades uses her as his hostage. But the bit that is news to Hades, the part that he couldn’t predict (perhaps because he doesn’t understand it), is that she inspires Percy to heroic action. Because of her, he makes the heroic choice not to rescue her from the Underworld. He believes that she’d never forgive him if he failed to stop the gods’ war for her, and his belief in her goodness shapes the outcome of the novel.
In other words, if not for the awesome parenting skills of Sally Jackson, The Lightning Thief would have been a very different and very sad book.
Instead of a war between gods and the catastrophic end to life as we know it (which would have been a downer), Percy gets a happy ending: His heroism is rewarded by the return of his mother. In fact, he has a reunion with his mother at the end of each of the first four books. In The Lightning Thief, he decides to return to live with her. In The Sea of Monsters and The Titan’s Curse, he calls home after he finishes with his adventures, and in The Battle of the Labyrinth, he returns home so his mother can throw him a birthday party. How many other heroes do that? Not many. Clearly, Percy and Sally have a strong and positive relationship, which makes her a shoo-in for the Best Parent Award, as well as one of the most important and influential characters in the series, despite her limited screen time.
Parents: Can’t Live With ’Em, Can’t Live Without ’Em
So what do all these parents up and down the scale have in common? Some are human; some are gods. Some are decent; some are the embodiment of all evil. Some never appear; some swoop in at the last minute to play pivotal roles in climactic scenes.
All of them, though, exert a profound influence on their children—and therefore on the course of the stories. Percy, Luke, Clarisse, Annabeth, and the other wonderful characters in Percy Jackson and the Olympians are constantly trying to live up to, get revenge against, gain approval from, get close to, get away from, or save the lives of their parents. We may not see the parents on stage often, but god or not, good or not, they are omnipresent.
And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have the sudden urge to call my mom. . . .
Sarah Beth Durst is the author of Into the Wild (Razorbill/Penguin, June 2007) and Out of the Wild (Razorbill/Penguin, June 2008), fantasy adventures about fairy tale characters who escaped from the fairy tale and what happens when the fairy tale wants its characters back. Sarah has been writing fantasy stories since she was ten years old, holds an English degree from Princeton University, and currently resides in Stony Brook, New York, with her husband, her daughter, and her ill-mannered cat. She also has a pet griffin named Alfred. (Okay, okay, that’s not quite true. His name is really Montgomery.) For more about Sarah, visit her online at www.sarahbethdurst.com.
Not Even the Gods Are Perfect
Disability as the Mark of a Hero
Elizabeth E. Wein
Maybe your brain is hardwired to read Ancient Greek. Maybe you’re struggling to read this book. You wish it was in an alphabet you recognized. You wish the words didn’t look like brain-teaser puzzles.
It’s far more likely that if you’re reading this, reading comes easy to you. Maybe you look at the kid in your class with learning disabilities and you think, “Must be stupid—he can barely read.”
Maybe you feel sorry for him. Maybe you’re interested in finding out more, but you’re shy and embarrassed and avoid making eye contact, or talking to him, because he’s so different and you don’t know what it’s like and you don’t want to say the wrong thing.
Maybe you make fun of him. Maybe behind his back, so he won’t know.
Maybe to his face. “Hey, here’s a hard one for you, what’s two plus two?” It’s got nothing to do with reading, but it’ll still hurt. It’s an easy insult.
I wish I had made it up for this essay. Unfortunately, someone said it last week to a dyslexic sixth grader at our local school.
Now, what if that kid had the power to sweep you off your feet with a wave of water, dump you upside down in a fountain, and leave you drenched, without ever touching you?
It’s less likely you’d do any more easy teasing.
And maybe more likely you’d want that kid on your side.
In the Percy Jackson books, the half-blood children of the Olympian gods are almost always marked by learning difficulties, specifically dyslexia and ADHD (Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder). It turns out that these distinctive problems, which society normally labels disabilities, are really signs of talents closely related to the hero’s divine origins. If you’re a half-blood, these apparent defects can also do two very useful things: They can reveal your true nature in the world of the gods, and disguise it in the world of mortal men.
Percy’s dyslexia is caused by the fact that his “mind is hardwired for Ancient Greek” (The Lightning Thief ). His ADHD, which makes it hard for him to pay attention in school, is due to his ability to see and sense more than normal mortals. When the disorder seems to make him impulsive and edgy, this is his “battlefield reflexes” kicking in. Most other half-bloods suffer from the exact same combination of disabilities, which is why in their guardian roles as keepers, satyrs always look for dyslexia when they’re scouting out potential Camp Half-Blood campers.
Why should Riordan choose to use disability in this way, as the mark of potential heroi
sm—indeed, as the mark of the children of gods?
In fact, this idea is not a new one. There are several conventions at work here. The first is a literary convention called a motif. A motif is a theme or image in a story that has been used many times in fiction or myth. The helpful, speaking horse, like Blackjack the Pegasus, is a traditional motif—it even has a catalogue number in an oversized book called the Motif-Index of Folk-Literature by folktale scholar Stith Thompson. The idea of the hero having a disability is not listed in the Motif-Index, but it is still a recognized literary theme. It’s also a historical one: Great people with disabilities have always inspired awe and admiration. Think of Admiral Horatio Nelson, the great English naval hero who was missing an arm; or President Franklin D. Roosevelt, confined to a wheelchair because of polio; or Ludwig van Beethoven, composing even after he had gone deaf.
The other convention Riordan draws on here is the idea that disability can be the gift of the gods. This belief goes a long way back into history. The Ancient Greeks called epilepsy “the sacred disease” because the sufferer was thought to be possessed by demons or gods; some truly impressive people throughout history were epileptic, including Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, St. Paul, Joan of Arc, and Napoleon Bonaparte.