A few nights ago I picked up the first book in the Percy Jackson series, which is written by Rick Riordian. It's a good book if you're younger than I am, and probably cooler if you're a boy, but it was good enough for me to finish it in about three hours. And although I enjoyed this book, there was something about it that I didn't like... and couldn't quite shake.
For those of you that don't know, the Percy Jackson series is about Percy, the son of Poseidon. He's a demigod in present-day America, where all the Greek gods exist. They explain that the Greek gods move with the Western civilization (which is why Mt. Olympus is in New York). Percy asked if this means God exists, and someone tells him that God with a capital G is metaphysical, which is something totally different and isn't even related to the subject of the Greek gods. This makes no logical sense with the Christian God, but obviously this is a work of fiction and no one believes in Greek gods anyway.
The thing I had a problem with was a subtler message in the first book. Apparently demigods give off this aura that monsters can smell, so monsters come to them. Percy's mother, an amazingly kind woman, wants to hide Percy's scent as long as possible, so she marries this terrible man named Gabe. Gabe is abusive, cruel, dirty, and stupid. And the reason she marries him is because Gabe's scent is so human, it masks Percy's.
So basically, the ultimate human -- the person who is so human that their scent can cover a demigod -- is the worst kind of human being on the planet.
