A Review of The Red Pyramid by Rick Riordan

Hooray, it's out! "It" being the first book in The Lightning Thief author Rick Riordan's new series based on the Egyptian gods and magic, The Red Pyramid. If your offspring loved the Percy Jackson series, you may already have this new book in your hot little hands. If not, what are you waiting for?

And of course, we have to ask ourselves, just how does the new book stack up?

On the one hand, I could argue that there's a whole lot of setup and explaining going on in The Red Pyramid. On the other hand, all of that is needed, and Riordan does a pretty good job of making the info dump a natural part of his storytelling as we discover things together with our young main characters.

Fourteen-year-old Carter Kane is the book's hero, along with his sister Sadie. After their mother's mysterious death, Sadie was sent to live in London with her maternal grandparents, while Carter traveled the world with his archaeologist father. Let's just note here that Carter is a little older than Percy Jackson when those stories began, which reminded me that the movie version made Percy older (so Riordan got smart about the age thing!). What I really like is that Carter and his sister are black—or at least, their father is black and their mother was white. I live in L.A., and mixed-race kids feel like a nice representation of our modern world. This also allows Carter and his sister to be connected by blood to the pharaohs of ancient Egypt, which ends up being an important plot point.

It's Christmas Eve, and Julius Kane is more nervous than usual. He takes his children to the British Museum, where he hopes to "make everything right," apparently by releasing a helpful Egyptian god. Unfortunately, he releases an evil Egyptian god named Set while he's at it and ends up trapped in a magic coffin which takes him away, leaving Carter and Sadie behind in the midst of what looks like a bombing. They are brought to their grandparents' house and interrogated by police who cast suspicion on Dr. Kane, then picked up by their father's wizardly brother Amos, who spirits them away to New York City to protect them from the newly unleashed Set. Because yeah, Sadie and Carter have powers, and they're part of something world-changing. And yeah, they need to save said world from Set's destructive plans.

Sadie and Carter find out more about Egyptian magic, their own heritage, and a group called the House of Light—protectors of Egyptian magic who would just as soon kill the two kids as have to deal with them. There are questions of who can be trusted, also who's possessed by an Egyptian god (for good or for ill). We get various adventures, including monster attacks, and some of the author's trademark humor along the way, with a cheery little side trip to the land of the dead. Riordan has Sadie and Carter take turns narrating, which is sometimes helpful and other times confusing. (Riordan even throws in some talk that makes the reader feel like he/she is not only being addressed by Carter and Sadie, but is being recruited to their cause.) This book is what they call uneven, but I have a feeling that, with all of the setup out of the way, Riordan will shine in the second and following books of the Kane Chronicles.

I got a kick out of the author's nod to his Olympians books, by the way. When Amos first takes the kids to the mansion, we read:

"So you can't live in Manhattan?" [Sadie] asked.
Amos's brow furrowed as he looked across at the Empire State Building. "Manhattan has other problems. Other gods. It's best we stay separate."
"Other what?" Sadie demanded.
"Nothing."

I should mention that one feature of Amos's mansion is a baboon named Khufu who's a huge fan of the L.A. Lakers. Other secondary characters include the helpful if unpredictable cat goddess Bast and a beautiful young girl named Zia from the House of Lights, whose loyalties are torn between her assigned duties and her desire to help Carter and Sadie. (Read: future sidekick/love interest comparable to Annabeth in The Lightning Thief.)

In a nice twist, late in the book Riordan has Carter make a really interesting decision about his potential for a powerful future. It's also intriguing to see how the author handles the issue of the missing Julius Kane.

A perfect read? No. But The Red Pyramid is nevertheless a good series start. If you're a Percy Jackson fan, read this one and then join me in looking forward to smoother sailing (preferably in a narrow reed boat with eyes) in Book 2.

Percy Jackson and His Sexy Friends

So I went and saw The Lightning Thief movie on Friday. It wasn't bad overall, although it didn't hold a candle to the best of the Harry Potter movies. No full review here, just an observation, and that is, apparently Hollywoodizing a children's book now includes a sensual if not sexual component. Thank you, Twilight. Or should we be thanking the likes of movie directors Judd Apatow, Todd Phillips, and John Hamburg, not to mention the last decade or two of Saturday Night Live writers, all of whom seem incapable of telling a story without a dose of steam?

For example, when Percy Jackson arrives at Camp Half-Blood in the movie, he sets his eyes on his about-to-be-sidekick, Annabeth, as played by Alexandra Daddario. Only in the movie, unlike in the book, Percy and Annabeth exchange a seemingly endless series of longing looks that reminded me of the yearning looks exchanged between Bella and Edward in the movie version of Stephenie Meyer's YA paranormal, Twilight. Here Annabeth Chase's slightly parted pillowy lips seem designed to accessorize her noticeable bosom. Yes, this is the hot version of Annabeth, which threw me off a bit as a reader of the series and also makes the Potter movies' cute-but-true-to-the-book-character Hermione seem better than ever. Especially considering Annabeth is written by Riordan as such a strong character, smart and independent. At least she gets to show off her combat and archery skills as the movie progresses!

Even Grover does not escape unscathed: he is presented as what the Brits in our midst would call randy. (In the books, Percy and Grover sometimes notice girls are cute, but that's about it.) Grover is also a hip-hop caricature; I suppose this is sort of fun, but I'm not sure I'm sold on it. Anyway, movie Grover acts hot-to-trot in Vegas, land of the Lotus Eaters, and even with Hades' wife Persephone, who also gets to be sexy in this film, coming on to Grover in turn. I realize satyrs have a reputation in mythology, but Riordan really didn't go there.

Finally, Logan Lerman, the actor who portrays Percy, looks like a young Chase Crawford. Which is pretty funny, since Gossip Girl's 24-year-old Chase is so young himself that he really shouldn't have a junior clone. But he does. Meet the movie Percy, who, like Annabeth, is fully capable of smoldering stares in the middle of the action.

At best, these touches of sensuality are a little distracting. At worst, they mar what started out as perfectly good middle grade fiction. Again, I have to recommend the Harry Potter movies, which manage to show adolescent crushes in a natural way, as part of the storytelling, i.e., without any panting, lip-parting, or pat sexual innuendos.

Good things about the movie? Well, the depictions of the gods and monsters are terrific. In particular, as the critics are saying, Uma Thurman's Medusa is wonderful. And I really did enjoy seeing this best-selling adventure story retold onscreen. But if you go to the movie theater to watch The Lightning Thief, be prepared for a few surprisingly sultry moments.

The Popular Kids

So this week I'm thinking about books that are so popular they get made into movies and are otherwise worshipped by vast quantities of young readers, as well as by old people hoping to make money. These would be the books considered commercial, the ones that make the bestseller lists. Some of them are even well written! No, seriously, there's a reason kids like certain series. Jeff Kinney's Diary of a Wimpy Kid books, for example, are among the funniest things I've ever read.

When I cruised the bookstore yesterday, I came across a new book in another popular series, the Alex Rider books by Anthony Horowitz. The flap copy for Crocodile Tears doesn't give away much, except to say that Alex has been recovering from a gunshot wound inflicted by a sniper and that he wants to live a normal life, but human suffering is a business, and he's about to have another spy-type adventure related to that business. This reminds me why I like the Alex Rider books—they're not like those movies where being a young spy is a frolicsome thing. We are shown, rather, that being a teen spy is to be hurt and dirty and even exploited by one's spy superiors. There are a lot of Alex Rider wannabe's out there, most of them inferior because the characterization isn't as strong, which is why I bought the book, no questions asked. And one of these days I'll get organized enough to write a detailed post about the Rider imitators!

Which, amusingly enough, include the Young James Bond books by Charlie Higson. It's obvious that somebody in the Bond franchise saw how well the Alex Rider series was doing and said, "Hey! We should be writing those, about a younger version of Agent 007!" So they did. In my opinion, the Higson books are a bit uneven. I think Robert Muchamore's Cherub series comes closer to the Alex Rider books as far as being gripping. You'll find that Muchamore's young heroes are more earthy, in part—truly—because they aren't upper-class kids like Alex. Along the same lines, I've noticed that my teenage students, who are mostly Latino and African American and quite poor, have no interest in Alex Rider. I figure it's because he's too rich and white and British. I suppose I'm not the first to wonder if we'd have more readers in the inner city if we had more books, not just about pregnant girls and drug dealers a la Precious, but along the lines of the Percy Jackson or Alex Rider series, only with young minority heroes.

Of course, the first book in the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series, The Lightning Thief, is now a movie that will be coming out on Presidents' Day weekend in 2010. In case you haven't seen it yet, here's the trailer. The movie poster is shown to the left.

Just who are the most popular kids in the world of children's books? For boys, always an uncertain audience, Diary of a Wimpy Kid is currently number one—it's about a middle school kid, but readers in grades ranging as low as fourth or even third get a kick out of it. For one thing, it's a friendly read, with a hand-written-style font, relatively few words on the page, and lots of illustrations, making it sort of a graphic novel, or halfway there. Main character Greg Heffley is one of the most selfish kids you'll ever meet, but the joke is that he's a pretty typical middle school kid and has no idea he's that selfish. Very few writers have captured the essential boyness of that age as well as Kinney has. And the stuff he makes into humorous episodes! Greg's little brother turning potty training into a racket, what happens when you tell a 12-year-old boy he has to do his own laundry, and the true terrors of public pools are just a few things that come to mind. If anything, the DWK books resemble a really well-written, character-driven comic strip like Calvin and Hobbes or FoxTrot. Makes sense, since Kinney is first and foremost a cartoonist. There's some Malcolm in the Middle and Everybody Hates Chris here, too. Of course, movie plans are already underway for the wimpy kid.

The Percy Jackson books were burning hot about three years ago and continue to be popular, with the upcoming movie amping up interest. In case you haven't heard, they're about a boy who finds out the Greek gods are alive and well and living above Manhattan. What's more, Percy is the son of Poseidon. He soon finds himself fighting off monsters and going on quests with his new friends, many of whom are also demigods. There's even a training camp!

As for the Alex Rider books, they're a little less popular now than they were five or six years back, but they continue to be recognized reads for tweens and teens, especially boys. (The movie didn't do very well.)

For girls, the Twilight books are still sizzling, with the rising of New Moon, the movie, getting fans ages 13 and 31 all twittery and giggly again. (Team Edward or Team Jacob?) But Twilight has migrated to the adult bestseller list somehow, and the true hot book on this week's New York Times bestseller list for children is Catching Fire, Suzanne Collins' highly anticipated sequel to last fall's hot book, The Hunger Games. The books are about a dystopian post-U.S.A. where teens from the 24 districts are forced to compete in gladiator-like games to the death. When two teens manage to beat the system in Book One, the government tries to use them in Book Two. Katniss and Peeta also find themselves becoming the symbols of a resistance movement.

I'll give you a hint about book popularity: besides checking the bestseller lists, note how many customer reviews have been written on the Amazon book page. Catching Fire has only been out since September 1 and it has already garnered 300 customer reviews, which is more than most books rack up in 5-10 years. Since a single review is unlikely to stand out in a batch that big, what's really happening is a conversation, with people feeling wildly compelled to chime in. I'm sure you're wondering, so here you go: Twilight has 4,536 customer reviews, while Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone has 5,543. The Hunger Games has 674 and The Graveyard Book has garnered 327, both in the past year. And books that aren't so popular, the vast unwashed masses of the publishing world? They usually show somewhere from 10 to 30 customer reviews.

Two other key books on the New York Times Bestseller list for children's chapter books this week are Ellen Hopkins' Tricks and Maggie Stiefvater's Shiver. Ellen Hopkins, as I've said before, is not for the faint of heart, and definitely not for Worried Parents. I heard her talk about this book and read a selection in a workshop at the August 2009 Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) Conference. She said something like, "Well, if people think my previous books were shocking, wait till they see this one!" Her latest novel-in-verse is about how a handful of teen characters become prostitutes. The author read us a poem about a teenage boy reluctantly having sex with two older men, and I have to say I felt all prudish just listening! But there you have it—it's a bestseller. [Note: See Ellen Hopkins' note in the comments. It is her hope that the book will deter young people from pursuing this lifestyle.]

Shiver is a werewolf story (207 customer reviews on Amazon), so its popularity may be linked to the phenomenon that is Twilight. I have read Stiefvater's book Lament: The Faerie Queen's Deception, and what I learned is that the woman is a very good writer, better than most of the people currently writing teen paranormal fiction. It shouldn't surprise you to hear that Shiver was just optioned to be made into a movie.

Neil Gaiman's Newbery winner, The Graveyard Book, continues to enthrall, speaking of well written. There's no question about this one becoming a movie!

Another much-anticipated book in the NYT's top ten is Fire by Kristin Cashore. I read Graceling last year and thought it was good, though I wasn't quite as enamored of it as some of my friends in the Kidlitosphere blogging community. Graceling is about a magically gifted warrior girl on a quest to circumvent the evil first manifested by the kidnapping of the elderly father of a king. Prequel Fire is set in the same world as Graceling, telling the story of an unnaturally beautiful girl, the daughter of a monster, who has powers of mind control and gets caught up in her country's political struggles. (I try not to get Catching Fire and Fire mixed up!) The cover art to the left is from the UK edition.

The other four books in the NYT's top ten are The Magician's Elephant by Kate DiCamillo (which someone just gave me for my birthday), The Million-Dollar Throw by Mike Lupica, Hush, Hush by Becca Fitzpatrick, and Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher. These are, respectively, another magical fable from the Newbery award-winning author of The Tale of Despereaux (which, you'll note, was made into a movie), a sports book in a series that's growing in popularity and really should generate at least one movie, a Twilightish paranormal romance about a hunky fallen angel, and a Young Adult novel about the reasons a teenager has killed herself.

Of the books on the list, The Magician's Elephant and Thirteen Reasons Why are probably the least commercial. I'm a little leery of teen suicide books, but that's just me—I've got more of a middle grade fiction personality than a YA one. Without even reading it, I can recommend The Magician's Elephant to you. Not to mention The Graveyard Book, which I have read. It manages to be both literary and commercial, a fairly remarkable achievement on Gaiman's part.

Overall, I thought this list was more promising than the list of Top Ten Bestsellers in Children's Picture Books, which made me want to cry. Read it and see if you can guess why: Fancy Nancy: Splendiferous Christmas by Jane O'Connor, The Christmas Sweater: A Picture Book by Glenn Beck, LEGO Star Wars by Simon Beecroft, Nubs by Mary Nethery, Waddle by Rufus Butler Seder, Eragon's Guide to Alagaesia by Christopher Paolini, Skippyjon Jones: Lost in Spice by Judy Schachner, Otis by Loren Long, Julie Andrews' Collection of Poems, Songs, and Lullabies by Julie Andrews and her daughter, Emma Walton Hamilton, and Where the Wild Things Are: The Movie Storybook by Barb Bersche.

From the depths of my soul, the question bursts forth: What are these kids reading? And close on its heels: What are their parents thinking?

Most of these "picture books" are movie tie-ins, books with visual effects, books by political pundits, etc. While I know Fancy Nancy is popular, I feel that after the first book, the series quickly sold out and went downhill, becoming a fashionable franchise (no pun intended) rather than true storytelling. For me, the only real books on the list are the poetry collection edited by Julie Andrews and her daughter, Skippyjon, and Otis. I have yet to get my hands on Andrews and Hamilton's anthology, but as a poet and poetry lover, I look forward to reading it. I confess I'm not a big fan of the Skippyjon books, possibly because I don't own a cat, although I suppose in this case the cat is actually a stand-in for a small child. I read Otis standing in a bookstore and thought it was a nice story about an anthropomorphized tractor, though not as compelling as, say, the classic Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel by Virginia Lee Burton.

Sigh.

If you take the time to skim through Amazon's list of the Top 100 Bestselling Books for Children, you'll get a little better picture of the market, finding other commercial books such as the 39 Clues series and my 9-year-old nephew's favorite, Klutz Press's very fun Encyclopedia of Immaturity, along with more literary works. Well, a few, anyway. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak is holding its own, for instance.

I did notice a boxed set of the first four Magic Treehouse books in the top 100. Mary Pope Osborne has really cornered the second grade series market, and yes, her books are a pleasant read. But I'm telling you—I can't wait for someone to come up with a far more wonderful series for that age group. So far, it hasn't happened. This begs the question: how good can a series actually be? Does the very concept of a series somehow dilute the literariness of books? Then, too, why do some books seem more like powerful sequels than a series series? Yes, some of the successful books listed above are series, but do second and following books fall short by definition?

On that conundrumical note, I'll conclude my report on the coolest of the cool. It's kind of like watching the popular kids at school. Sometimes you wonder why they're popular when they seem so ordinary, or even, in some cases, so unappealing. On the other hand, there are times it makes sense. Some of the popular kids are truly extraordinary, and their singular status seems completely deserved.

A Review of The Immortal Fire by Anne Ursu

While Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson and the Olympians series has been selling like crazy, you may have missed another series about contemporary kids and Greek gods, Anne Ursu's Cronus Chronicles. Book One, The Shadow Thieves, came out about six months after Riordan's first book about Percy Jackson, The Lightning Thief, suggesting once again that certain themes float into different authors' psyches at around the same time. Yet Ursu's trilogy has been overshadowed by Riordan's five books. Today I'm looking at Ursu's series wrap-up, Immortal Fire, but I definitely recommend all three books. I think they're just as good as Riordan's, and they have the advantage of a clever tongue-in-cheek tone.

Quick overview: In The Shadow Thieves, Charlotte and her cousin Zee stop a plot by a demon grandson of Poseidon, Philonecron, to take over the Underworld using the shadows of children as an army. Unfortunately, having their shadows stolen makes human children sick. Even more unfortunately, Zee is the unwitting conduit for this endeavor. But he and Charlotte fight back, and they are able to thwart Philonecron's dastardly plans.

Still, family is family, and Book Two, The Siren Song, finds Poseidon responding to his grandson's request for vengeance against the two mortal children who have dishonored him. What's more, Charlotte is up against something not often seen in children's fantasy books, which is that her parents freak out about her long absence to save the world. Naturally, they don't believe her crazy story; instead they ground her and make appointments with a child psychologist.

When her family wins a cruise soon afterward, it doesn't occur to Charlotte that she is being set up for Poseidon's wrath to crash down on her head like a tsunami. And Zee finds himself in the unenviable position of being even more of a pawn for Philonecron than before. After some wild adventures on the cruise ship, which is mysteriously transported to the Mediterranean Sea, Charlotte and Zee eventually manage to prevail yet again. Siren Song is my favorite of the three books, if only because of Ursu's depiction of Poseidon as the tacky blue-skinned, gold chain-wearing owner of a luxury boat he has plastered with portraits of himself. (Come to think of it, her portrayal of all of the fallible Greek pantheon is pretty amusing!)

I noticed that The Immortal Fire drags in a few spots, but Ursu ultimately comes through, wrapping up the trilogy with dash and humor. Charlotte and Zee's mentor, Mr. Metos, who is a member of a secret society called the Prometheans, doesn't take the two kids seriously enough, considering all they've accomplished. When the Chimera burns down the middle school and snatches Charlotte, Mr. Metos begins to pay a little more attention. Such strange things are happening in the Mediterranean that they're making the TV news, yet no one figures out that Philonecron is back in action, having gotten his hands on Poseidon's trident.

This time, Philonecron is gunning for Zeus and mastery of the entire universe, and he's going to use his arch nemesis Charlotte to help him do it. One of the funniest things about these books is the way the author stops every so often to show us just what's going on in this towering narcissist's head. (I suspect Phil is secretly Ursu's favorite character!) Here's a passage in which Philonecron is planning world domination, but still worrying about thirteen-year-old Charlotte Mielswetzski, who has already foiled his schemes twice:

He was a hero, this was a hero's journey, an epic for the ages—the saga of a humble demon's long journey from Underworld garbage collector to Supreme Lord of All Creation.... but every hero had a nemesis, one as terrible as he was great. It was only literary....

Was she still out there, lurking in her vile little lair, clad in an item from her relentless series of discount casual wear, plotting her next move in her eternal quest to ruin his life? What if—it was absurd, but bear with him—what if at his moment of triumph, when Zeus was on his knees quavering in front of the trident, weeping and pleading, what if the little mortal monster appeared—because that was what she did, she appeared, and ruined everything? What if, just as he was about to get what he most wanted, she came, grabbed his beautiful dream with her sticky little hands, and stomped on it with her squeaky rubber soles?

Naturally, Charlotte will appear. Charlotte is ordinary and grubby and kind of cranky, but above all she is tenacious. Before she can confront the vain villain, however, she and Zee will have to save an angry teenager named Steve from the misguided Prometheans and find their way to Greece, where breaking into Mt. Olympus is just a little harder than it sounds. As the book progresses, Ursu works in themes like self-sacrifice and love, having social outsider Charlotte bely her own cynicism and Zee make an unthinkable choice, but most of all, The Immortal Fire, like its two predecessors, is just a funny, off-the-wall ride.