Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Camp (part 1)

Harry Percy, Hermione Annabeth, and Ron Grover go to boarding school summer camp with other children who have magic powers an Olympian god as a parent.  During the school year summer, they foil a plot that would bring Voldemort Kronos back to power.


Oi.  Going in, I didn't think that Percy Jackson and the Olympians would lean so heavily on the Harry Potter formula, but I guess the reviews all warned that this was the "next thing" to read after HP.  Riordan definitely succeeds in writing a story whose overarching plot I want to follow to conclusion, but it falls down in several places.


To start, there's the setting.  Both authors need a place where the kids are away from their families (such as they are).  Rowling trades on the English boarding school experience to give us something "ordinary" to hold on to, and by spending time developing their class schedules and extracurricular activities, life at Hogwarts comes to be very real.  Riordan can't send his kids to boarding school; aside from the fact that it would be too like HP, middle-class Americans tend to not send their children to boarding school; the only time we're sent away from home is for summer camp, so it's natural for Riordan's heroes to go there.  Unlike Hogwarts, however, life at Camp Half-Blood is somewhat perfunctory, and only serves as a staging ground for the real adventures out in the wide world.  We're told that they do archery, canoeing, climbing walls, and other typical summer camp activities (with demigod overtones), but we're really only shown Quidditch capture the flag.


Most of Rowling's characters are afraid to say Voldemort's name, so Riordan apes this by having characters be cautious about saying the names of gods and monsters.  This is a hideous mistake, first because "minotaur" is not the beast's name; it's Asterion**.  Second, Riordan applies this rule mostly to shut down conversation about a particular god/monster when the characters get close to something he doesn't want to reveal yet or can't figure out another way to segue out of the conversation.  Other authors, including Rowling, are also guilty of coming up with silly reasons for their characters not to talk to each other about important things, but the inconsistency of the use of the "don't use the names of the gods" rule is particularly galling.  Gah.


** and it's Heracles, not Hercules.  If you're going to use Greek mythology, use all the Greek names.