This was the most fun I’ve had at the movies in quite a while.

I was getting really nervous about the film adaptation of one of my absolute favorite children’s novels of recent years. I love all things Percy Jackson, and I’ll go ahead and commit the blasphemy of saying that at times I love him even more than Harry Potter. I am a huge HP fan, too, but sometimes those books (and movies) can be so English that I myself start to feel like I have ADHD. Hermione’s restrained indignation, Snape’s perfectly articulated villainy, Harry and Ron’s wide-eyed, schoolboy senses of humor. Sometimes I want to bury myself in those characters and not come out, and sometimes it all just makes me…itchy. So when Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson, a street-smart New Yorker with a more relaxed, jeans-and-hoodie sense of humor, burst onto the literary scene with The Lightning Thief, it was kind of like exhaling for a Jersey girl like myself. It was funny, quick, mischievous, and with just enough attitude to appeal to me. Percy Jackson is my people. So the film adaptation is a big deal.

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