Shadow Street Chapter 4
Book Talk: Book: The Lightning Thief
I left a review I didn’t like much for The Lightning Thief, by Rick Riordan on Goodreads
The movies, at least the ones that I saw, were good. Not great, but good. The kids were too old. The Disney+ series, I quite liked a lot, and it made me interested in reading the book again. I’ve had the book in and out of my reading list for quite a long time. I want to like this story. I think the idea is solid, and I think that the concepts and situations are all good.
My major problem with it is that to me, it’s a snooze fest, but also exactly the kind of book I’m supposed to love. Moderately disconcerting.
I don’t like my opinion, but I am determined to give it the benefit of the doubt. I’ve already got book two set aside, but I don’t know if I feel the need to read it before the second season of the Disney+ series (which I hear is already moving forward) comes up. I think that somehow seeing that, might be what inspires me to want to read the second book. I just don’t feel any urgency to get into the next one, and that’s kind of bugging me. Part of my issue is the first-person point-of-view. Not that it’s Percy, but I’m banking on his voice, sounding better as he grows older. Despite all the god-like powers he has, his voice is that of a whiny kid.
I also resent (lightly) the crack in chapter 10 about the furies having Southern accents from “somewhere farther south than Georgia.” I’m from Georgia, from Atlanta. We from that region have an incredibly distinctive, yet neutral accent. It’s a strange bubble to come from. I felt it was a slightly New Yorker elitist line, and it made me feel like the writer thinks people from the South are monsters. Probably unintentional, but it made me less inclined to root for Percy if this is his real opinion. He also seems inclined to dismiss overweight people. I imagine I will write and put into a book something that unintentionally makes someone else feel the same way. I hope not, but it’s probably an eventual truth, that I’d like to avoid.
Is it bad that I think Hades should have killed Percy and the other kids, then appointed his skeleton to lead his army and taken the bolt for himself?
My books are still nothing compared to the success of this one, but it still seems like this is a lesson in how I should strengthen my characters.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6260775323
Fiction Excerpt
Shadow Street Chapter 4
The owl ruffled its feathers and peered down at us with large orange eyes that tore my soul out of my body. I felt weak in the ankles and held onto Mr. Curtis by the hat to keep from falling over. Trouble was, he was jumping up and down, trying to get us killed.
“Freeze, frog,” I said, trying to hold him still, but he got out from under my grasp and jumped up onto a pile of old newspapers the owl must have been keeping.
“Mr. Curtis!”
Nothing. He stood up, took his hat off, and bowed before the great owl.
The owl flew down to a bar closer to us. His eyes seemed to glow in the dark.
“Greetings,” said the frog.
“Save it,” said the owl. This caused Mr. Curtis to step back a little, even if slightly.
The owl flew closer again, now face to face with Mr. Curtis. I realized I was closer to the owl now than I could imagine. I felt like lunch on a stick, running around in front of him like an idiot.
“Arthur,” said the owl.
“What?” I said, without knowing it.
“Sorry, Sir. Arthur,” said Curtis. He bowed again.
“I assume you've got something to show me?” Arthur shook out a wing and pointed to Mr. Curtis’s hat on the floor.
“Yes, here. We encountered these in a bakery nearby, and I was wondering…” he handed one bun up, and the bird snatched it in its beak and ate it so quickly that I fell to the floor.
As he chewed, he looked over at me, where I was cowering, and still expecting to be eaten any second. “What's his, um, problem, Mr. Curtis?”
“Oh, he’ll be fine,” said Mr. Curtis.
I struggled to my feet as Arthur chewed, and looked at the ceiling, then quickly back at me. He jumped to the floor and crouched down to look through my eyes and into my brain. He finished the roll. And opened his beak and stretched it. I survived, as I've been able to chronicle this adventure, so I stood my ground. He turned his head to look at me a different way and smacked his beak one more time.
“I've tasted this evil once before,” said the owl. He flew back up to a more comfortable perch for him and turned around after shaking his tail feathers at us. One of them fell to the ground at our feet.
“Take that. Throw it in a fire if you need to see me, and it's an emergency.”
I picked up the feather and tucked it in my jacket pocket, unsure exactly what he meant by that.
“Curtis, have you seen anything like this before. It's not as simple as a curse or common magic. I believe we are looking at something from beyond.”
Arthur twisted its head to something on the floor. It was Mr. Curtis’s hat. One roll fell to the floor and was wriggling away, little tentacles growing through the dough.
It shot one out at Mr. Curtis and wrapped around his legs, knocking him down. He struggled, and I watched, unable to move as it got larger and larger. It was crawling up to the frog’s gaping mouth, where he was trying to breathe and get control. He scraped at the floor, right as Arthur landed, his talons ripping directly into Mr. Curtis’s belly. No, not Mr. Curtis, the tangled tentacle-bun. The owl squished it to shreds, never arming my friend.
I helped him up.
“Have you got another one in there, Mr. Curtis?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Give it to me. I've got something to check, please.”
“Here it is,” he said, handing it up, and putting his top hat back in place.
“I'll be in touch Curtis. Be careful. This isn't your ordinary mystery.”
Arthur gently took the roll in its talons, hopped toward the crack in the inside of the clock face, and flew away, out across the city.
“Well, I knew that, didn't I?” said the frog.
“You almost got us killed.”
“Arthur, no. He’d never kill me.”
“I'm not talking about you, you numskull. Do you see all this around us?”
“Bones, I know how owls eat.”
“Bones of rats and mice.”
He blinked and looked around at the tiny piles of bones around, behind the stacks of newspapers.
“Oh,” he said. He could comprehend if you worked with him sometimes.
“How do we get down out of here?”
“Back this way.” He hopped through piles of decimated, broken bones, and newspaper clippings, and I followed him down the path to the elevators we had come up. It seemed more morbid on the way out than on the way in.
We got into the elevator and took it down to the ground floor, and went back out onto the street. Above us in the sky, Arthur circled, spied with his exceptional eyes, and glided away until we could no longer see him.
We stepped out onto the pavement, and Mr. Curtis jumped and leaped his way down the street.
“I say, Mr. Curtis.”
“Come on, no cabs this close to Arthur’s tower.”
“Oh, no.”
I carried on after him. I could run pretty quickly, but only in short bursts. Every once in a while I had to run behind something, more an instinct than anything, and hide, then. I was back on his trail again. We got back out to Main Street, and traffic picked up again. Dogs pulled cabs as they barked about pests in their fur and what kind of treatment they were going to eat when they got home.
I stuck out my hand and waved down a dachshund, pulling a cab.
“Hello, there gents.”