Demigods and Monsters (16 page)

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.

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
.

M
aybe 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 heroism—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.

So the idea of disability as both the mark of a hero and an
advantage
to the hero is a solid tradition which Riordan uses in his own way to create the world of Percy Jackson.

Dyslexia is a language-based learning disability. It can occur at all levels of intelligence, and it is not a sight disorder, though it does affect the way people see words. It's a
decoding
problem. It most commonly causes trouble with reading; the word comes from the Greek words
dys
, meaning “impaired,” and
lexis
, meaning “word.” Dyslexia doesn't affect a person's ability to learn to talk, but it can produce trouble (and often does) with spelling, writing, and pronouncing words. It can hamper one's ability to read and process math problems too, although it doesn't adversely affect the ability to
do
math (that's called dyscalculia).

There are many different ways dyslexia can impair learning, and these usually overlap. Percy's dyslexia seems to be strictly visual, but of course we don't see him writing a lot of notes or trying to spell when he's in the middle of fighting off monsters. He doesn't seem to have any trouble filling out the delivery slip when he sends Medusa's head to Olympus in
The Lightning Thief
, at least. That his dyslexia is chiefly visual makes sense, though, because it's supposed to be connected to Percy's natural ability to read in another alphabet. For Percy and the other half-bloods, it's incredibly ironic that a reading disability with a Greek name is actually a sign of an innate ability to
read
Ancient Greek.