The Lightning Thief

The Lightning Thief (the first book of the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series) is about a 12-year-old boy, Percy Jackson, who’s been in and out of multiple schools due to people not understanding his neurodivergence and who struggles with problems at home with his abusive step-dad.  Percy starts noticing weird things happening (like vanishing math teachers and people with hooves around his school), and wonders what’s going on.  Percy soon learns that he’s actually the son of a Greek god (which would make him a demi-god) and is being chased by monsters out to get him.  So, Percy is taken to Camp Half-Blood, a summer camp designed especially for demi-god children.  However, someone steals Zeus’s lightning bolt and Percy is a suspect.   With the help of his friends, Grover and Annabeth, Percy goes on a quest to find the lightening bolt before drastic measure are taken.  A while back, I tried to read this book but found parts of the Greek myth aspect very weird so I didn’t finish the book.  Recently, I decided to try reading it again and it was definitely better than I thought it was going to be!  I still think it’s a bit overrated but there are some good parts of the book.  It’s very witty at times and I really enjoyed Percy and his friends’ characters and I think the book is overall well-written.  However, I still don’t enjoy some of the Greek myth aspects in the book.  If you go and read Greek mythology, you will find lots of dark and freaky stories and this book doesn’t shy away from mentioning some of these tales.  I actually personally think this book is way darker than the first Harry Potter book and I don’t understand why some people think it’s cleaner.  This post is not meant to criticize where the first Percy Jackson book falls short, though, but to point out the book’s presentation of neurodiversity.  What really jumps out at me about this book was the fact that the main character, Percy Jackson, is neurodivergent; he is an ADHDer (learned this term recently) and dyslexic.  As a neurodivergent person myself, I was a bit worried at how the book was going to portray this but I was pleasantly surprised.  There is one line of the book that stands out to me and the whole sentence basically translates to “your ADHD is keeping you alive.” This sentence stands out to me because it views ADHD as a good thing and most of the time in the media ADHD/neurodiversity is viewed as weakness.  Yet, if Percy tried to “cure” his ADHD, he might become toast (so to speak) because his neurodivergence makes him hyper-aware of everything around him and is thus considered a gift of sorts.   As someone who is autistic, I can actually relate to Percy in some ways.  I was in and out of multiple school environments and had a very hard time in school due to teachers not getting me.  I definitely had ADHD-I traits at times and would spend classes zoning out and drawing pictures; and while I wasn’t dyslexic, I struggled with reading comprehension, and it didn’t help that the classrooms were always noisy so I couldn’t really focus.  But my neurodivergence doesn’t need to be cured!  In fact, my neurodivergence, like Percy’s, helps me get through life.  Without being autistic, I wouldn’t think the way that I do, I wouldn’t be as creative as I am, and I would be a totally different person.  And that’s what people need to start realizing—that neurodivergence is nothing to be ashamed of and is something that should be celebrated.  I’m not saying that being neurodiverse is perfect.  We have days where we struggle, mostly due to society not accepting us.  Why won’t society accept the very thing that’s keeping us going?  When will we learn to love and accept our neurodivergence?

“The letters float off the page when you read, right? That’s because your mind is hardwired for ancient Greek. 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.”  A quote from Annabeth