As I said in the last post I wrote about Percy Jackson, anyone who has been eager to continue reading about the adventures of Percy Jackson can pick up the three complementary books of the series: Percy Jackson’s Greek Gods, Percy Jackson’s Greek Heroes, and Percy Jackson – the Demigod files.
If you want to know about the complementary book “Percy Jackson – the Demigod files”, I invite you to visit this blog post.
In this post we will talk about Percy Jackson’s Greek Heroes, which for me is the second of the complementary books… I don’t think they have a reading order, but since I read it second… it’s the second Percy Jackson complementary book… for me.
The book is a series of chapters that tell the stories of the different most famous Greek heroes in history. From Perseus, Theseus, Orpheus, Hercules … as well as heroines like Atalanta or Utrera. (It is worth reading the stories of these heroes and heroines on Wikipedia or some other reliable source, to get some context about their stories, either, before reading them, or, like I did, while reading the book).
One of the best chapters of this book is undoubtedly that of Hercules. It is the longest of the entire book, since he is the Greek hero with more feats accomplished. Rick Riordan unleashes all his creativity in the history of Hercules, telling the story of the twelve tasks with overflowing humour. It must have more than one joke per page, which makes the reading very fun and enjoyable.
Regarding many of the stories, and the author himself warns us about this, they have a disastrous ending for the heroes. Rick Riordan is not inventing anything new in that regard, since these are the real stories of these heroes (real in the sense that they are universally accepted stories, not «real» in the sense that they were true… we are talking about legends and mythology). The added extra is “who” is telling the story, theoretically, Percy Jackson, who comments as the person he is: a young teenager…son of Poseidon.
Final comment: despite not being part of the Percy Jackson saga, this one is a book that complements very well with the universe created by Rick Riordan. Full of humour, it is a pleasant reading that I recommend to anyone who does not feel like “thinking” too much about what they are reading, and who wants to be carried away by an entertaining story (or group of stories).
Keep on reading,
GG KLIMT 