Am I enjoying a fantasy book?

I do not read fantasy books. Books with goblins and nymphs and all that. They are not for me. I like books about reality, books about normal people.

So why am I enjoying the first Percy Jackson book? And why am I loving it?

If you've not read Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief... it's about a boy who is struggling in school. He's been expelled from six in six years.

But it turns out Percy is no ordinary boy. As it says on the back of the book, he is half boy, half god.

Yes, that's where I switched off when told about it a few years ago.

But, here I am, reading it and loving it.

It's written in a normal first person fourteen-year-old boy's voice. Very convincing. He is confused about a lot of things - like a lot of fourteen year old boys (and forty-four year old men, frankly).

As his demigod-ness becomes clearer, a lot of strange (and fantasy-style) things happen to him.

But they're great things, not stupid.

I thought fantasy fiction was rubbish.

I was wrong.*







* I used to think that crime fiction was a waste of time, too. But now I write crime fiction for children.