Demigods and Monsters (20 page)

Not only that, but Percy is also the child of an undereducated (albeit smart) mom, who is married to a brutish oaf of a man, Percy's stepfather. Percy's real dad is completely missing in action. Even without Percy's issues with ADHD, his situation on the home front doesn't give him much hope. All things considered, it would be easy enough to plant a big fat prophecy on Percy's head, one that does not include things like college, law school, or a great job with benefits.

As it turns out, prophecies based on circumstances such as Percy's are fairly easy to make, and all of them include the word
struggle
. From the very first page, even though there are no Olympians present, we can peg Percy. We know his type. We've met him in our classrooms, our neighborhoods, our soccer teams. Even without special powers, we can predict what is in store for someone like him: a lot of hard work. So it makes sense that even before Percy Jackson discovers that he isn't completely human, he's seen the future.

So what Rick Riordan has ingeniously done with Percy in his
human
world is to prepare him for the obstacles he'll have to face as a half-blood. The challenges Riordan placed upon Percy in his younger life—his learning disabilities and his family situation—served their purpose of “toughening up Percy” for the obstacles, namely the monsters, he will be forced to face in each and every quest.

The very first prophecy the Oracle delivers to Percy is presented by his human familiars. As Percy recounts it:

The attentive reader will realize the Oracle is no dummy. Percy will face many monsters in his quests, but at this particular moment, the worst among them are the sneering men around the poker table, lead by his stepfather, Gabe Ugliano.

Annabeth comfirms this when she reminds Percy, “The real world is where the monsters are. That's where you learn whether you're any good or not.”

Percy's genetics are at play here as well. Embedded in everyone's genes lay a million small and large prophecies. Our penchant for music or science or art, the hand we write with, the way we laugh or cough, the turn of our feet when we walk—so much is decided before we're even born. Suffice it to say that our parentage is the first factor in determining who we are, how we are, and the ways our lives turn out. (That said, I never inherited my mother's third eye.)

The ADHD that caused him so many difficulties in the world of humans, it turns out, is a necessary trait for heroes. As Annabeth explains, “And the ADHD—you're impulsive, can't sit still in the classroom. That's your battlefield reflexes. In a real fight, they'd keep you alive. As for the attention problems, that's because you see too much, Percy, not too little. Your senses are better than a regular mortal's.”

Thanks to his father's DNA, Percy gains power from submersion in bodies of water. He can breathe underwater and communicate with the creatures of the sea. The water is his friend. From the moment he emerged from his mother's watery womb, every cell in his body had a prophecy: born to swim! And throughout the stories, Percy uses these abilities time after time to rescue himself and his friends.

And speaking of friendship, this leads us to what may be the largest prophecy of all when it comes to Percy Jackson: his fatal flaw.

One of the trademarks of the stories given to us by the Greeks is the notion that every hero has a tragic shortcoming. Perhaps the most famous can be found in Homer's
The Iliad
. Achilles, the hero of Troy, was the strongest, bravest warrior of all; his body could withstand
any assault. He believed that he was immutable, unassailable, immortal. His only weak point on his entire body was his heel, and who knew anything about that? Sure enough, someone shot an arrow right into his heel, and that was the end of Achilles—and Troy too. From that day forward, our “Achilles' heel” has been synonymous with our weak point, and nothing supposedly makes us weaker than a fatal flaw.

Percy learns about fatal flaws from Annabeth when she tells him about her own:
hubris
. “Hubris means deadly pride, Percy,” she tells him. “Thinking you can do things better than anyone else . . . even the gods.”

But why is a fatal flaw so instrumental in a good story? The Greeks inherently knew that the most important rule that a writer can never break is to “worry the reader.” Once we become aware of the hero's weakest point, then we are constantly worried about whether or not the hero's enemies will discover that weakness and use it against him or her. Once we know what the hero's soft spot is, we can foresee—we can prophesize—that the hero will have to reckon with it. The flaw itself is where the potential for failure lies. You could say that a hero without a flaw is
less than human
. And therein lies the rub. Percy is
more
than human. He's a half-god.

Unlike the Oracle's pronouncements and Percy's dreams, which to a great extent come from external sources, his fatal flaw is internal, something that comes from within. Annabeth's mother, Athena, pegs it when she and Percy have their talk on Mount Olympus: “Your fatal flaw is personal loyalty, Percy. You do not know when it is time to cut your losses. To save a friend, you would sacrifice the world. In a hero of the prophecy, that is very, very dangerous.”

As Percy grows in both years and experience, he also makes more and more of his own choices. And at the end of the day, isn't choice a distinctly human quality? Despite the circumstances of our births, our families, our economics, and our traits, humans continue to overcome even the direst of situations. Percy is part god, but he is
also part human, and his loyalty to his friends is, at its heart, human. Will Percy's very humanity turn out to be his greatest asset? Or his deepest flaw? At the end of book four,
we are worried
. Riordan has not broken this important rule.

It's also true that one's greatest weakness can also be one's greatest strength. I'm not sure who said that, but in the meantime we can take heart in the fact that though we are all, like Percy, to a certain extent children of prophecies—whether those prophecies have to do with our genes, our circumstances, or whatever gods and goddesses (a.k.a. parents, grandparents, teachers, and—okay—higher powers too) look over us—we can make our own choices. We can face down those monsters in our paths. We can take whatever the fates have handed us and use it for the greater good. No matter what our bloodlines, we can still be heroes.

We can thaw out our eyeballs and focus on something besides our noses.

Kathi Appelt is the author of more than thirty books for children and young adults. Her first novel,
The Underneath
, was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2008. She lives in College Station, Texas, with her husband Ken and four adorable cats. She doesn't have an Oracle in her attic, nor does she own a Ouija board. But she does read her horoscope every morning just to be on the safe side.

W
hen I was about nine, I had a horrible recurring dream. It was pretty simple. All I could see was a face, which at first was small and in the distance, but then got bigger and bigger till it seemed to be right on top of me. I couldn't see a body, just a face. It was a monstrous face: very, very pale, almost gray-skinned, with big staring eyes so pale they seemed almost white and a thin pale mouth, that opened on to long yellow teeth tipped with red. Straggly
hair that seemed to move and lift in an invisible wind blew out around the face as if there was an electric current running through it, or as if each hair was alive and wriggling horribly. I always woke up just as the mouth opened wide on a terrible scream, and I'd be screaming myself, yelling my head off.

My mother would come running, but I was so scared of that dream I could not bring myself to tell her about it. I also thought that maybe if I said nothing, then I would forget it and it would go away. So I dreamed it three times before my mother finally persuaded me to tell her about it. As I described it to her, stammering over the words, I was suddenly filled with a frightening thought. What if telling her, describing the face in words, made it leave my dreams—but come into my real life? Or what if now I could never forget it, because I had fixed it in words, made it almost solid? I thought that my mother would tell me not to be scared, that it was just a nightmare, that it wasn't real. That she wouldn't understand what it was like to stand there paralyzed in your dream as the monster came closer and closer and you couldn't move or scream or do anything at all. Except wake up. And then lie there worrying about whether, if you closed your eyes, it would come back.

But instead she said to me, “Did that monster remind you of anything?”

“Anything real?” I whispered.

“Real, or in a story.”

I thought about it. I loved stories. I loved reading them and listening to them and trying to write my own. I'd learned to read very early and spent as much time with books and stories as I could. My favorites were fairy tales, legends, and myths. The monstrous face could be like the wicked witch out of
Hansel and Gretel
. It could belong to some monster King Arthur killed. But as I thought about it, I knew what the monster actually reminded me of. Earlier that year I'd been given a marvelous book called
Tales of the Greek Heroes
, by Roger Lancelyn Green. It was about Hercules and Theseus and
Jason and Perseus and others, the adventures they had and the monsters they had to fight. I loved that book and read it several times. I especially loved the story of Perseus, with its high glamour, its rich fairy tale atmosphere: the prophecy about Perseus' birth, his mother Danae locked up in a stone tower by her father, Zeus coming to Danae in a shower of gold, the mother and child being cast away to die in the sea, the rescue by a fisherman, then Perseus growing to manhood, the magic gifts the gods and nymphs had given him, the way he rescued Andromeda from the dragon, and. . . .