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Greek myths have tried.
    And this is no accident.
    The gods of Olympus—all-powerful, simultaneously good and bad, unpredictable, oddly human in their flaws—are stand-ins not only for the establishment (school, society, church) but also for those other godlike beings: parents.
    Rick Riordan has rightly seen this and created a story about the children of the gods, who are in precisely the same power relationship to their very-much-alive-and-kicking gods as children in our world are to their parents. And this, I think, is one of the secrets to the success of the series: It mimics the experience of everyone growing up—and of every person’s troublesome need to become him- or herself.

Seeing Clearly
    The Lightning Thief is also about “seeing clearly”: the schools Percy has attended (six so far) and the various teachers he’s had, as well as his smelly unpleasant stepfather, have marked him down as a troublemaker and a no-hoper. When something goes wrong, it must be Percy’s fault.
    And that’s because they don’t see the real Percy.
    Nor, for that matter, does he see them very clearly: He’s unaware that his teacher Mr. Brunner is actually a centaur, that Mrs. Dodds is a razor-taloned Fury out for his blood, that his best friend Grover is a cloven-footed satyr, and that the three old ladies on the roadside are the Fates.

    Later, he fails to see through the disguises the various gods or monsters adopt—sometimes until it’s almost too late, as when the Mother of Monsters, Echidna, along with her doggie-who-ain’t-a-doggie, tries to turn him into a smokin’ shish kebab.
    Percy’s failure to “see clearly” extends to his “normal” life as well: His dyslexia, considered a handicap in our world, causes visual distortions. “Words had started swimming off the page, circling my head, the letters doing one-eighties as if they were riding skateboards,” he describes it in The Lightning Thief . In reality, the dyslexia is the result of Percy’s brain being hard-wired for Ancient Greek and is part of his uniqueness.
    But most of all, Percy doesn’t see himself clearly.
    Like the schools and society that have labeled him as some kind of maverick and failure, he sees himself in terms of those same labels.
    In the Rags to Riches story, the true focus is not so much on growing up, as it is one of its chief requirements: becoming aware .
    It is learning to be conscious , learning to see clearly and wholly, that distinguishes these types of stories. Even Peter Rabbit manages to escape the dangerous farmer and the garden in which he eats and plays to his heart’s content (like any egocentric infant) only when he climbs up high to get a better view of things.
    Attaining consciousness—awareness—is the true mark of the rebel, and the greatest danger for those in power, whether they be gods or parents. It is no coincidence that authoritarian regimes, like Saddam Hussein’s pre-invasion Iraq, seek always to control the media and to dictate what people can and can’t know.

Rags to Riches
    In his astonishing book The Seven Basic Plots , Christopher Booker outlines and explores the fundamental stories that have entranced, and continue to entrance, the human race. One of these is the
Rags to Riches plotline. While many stories combine more than one of these plots ( Star Wars is both a Rags to Riches story and an “Overcoming the Monster” story, as is The Lightning Thief ), I want to concentrate on the Rags to Riches plotline, in which, as Booker puts it, “a young central figure emerges step by step from an initial state of dependent, unformed childhood to a final state of complete self-realization and wholeness”—in other words, the hero gains maturity throughout the journey, or rite of passage, that he experiences.
    Why is this story, above all others, told so often?
    The quick answer is that it is the only