Drake said
Am I the only person who thinks this is turning out better than some of Riordan's works, or is it just because I'm getting older and more used to more mature stories?
People who write to a specific audience also tailor their style and syntax toward said audience. Riordan used familiar themes that were simple, along with simple sentence structure and word flow. It was written in hopes of attracting a young, teenage audience rather than a young, adult audience that books like Harry Potter and Twilight and Hunger Games were more geared toward. Those books had, like Vic said, more mature themes, laden with underlying tones to parallel certain societal and political issues that have been arising, or have been an issue since older eras, i.e. Hunger Games' dystopian government reflecting our own.
Riordan refrained from that, kept things simple rather than complex. There were no double meanings to the lessons he had Percy learn. His text isn't laden with underlying tones and sub-text geared toward making readers think deeper about the world around them. It's refreshing as an adult, endearing, even, but the best memories of it were as a child, when adventure and epic tales meant something different than it does to us today. :) Plus PJO gave us Greek Mythology without all the sexual context and consent issues and realistic violence most epics would contain. Great education for a young mind without traumatizing it. o_o
Though I will say that abandonment issues and abusive parents is a mature issue he touches upon, which is very mature but I don't think he went about it in the way books like Divergent did. But nothing in regards to Divergents conformity or segregation themes, or Hunger Games' dystopia and revolution, or Twilight's dubious consent issues and sexual themes, etc. I mention these because they're fresh in my mind and things like Dan Brown's books and To Kill A Mockingbird weren't necessarily focusing on attracting younger audiences
