tayananyx

[tayananyx]

So I read Percy Jackson:Chalice of the Gods and…let me just get this out of the way: IT WAS FANTASTIC!

From the very first line of the book I was transported back in time to middle school where I walked the halls with my face buried in a PJO book. I missed Percy and his point of view so much that I literally started crying the moment his sarcastic inner monologue uttered its first words. This novel was like a fantasy to me with the return of the golden trio and following their wacky hijinks as they try to do quite possibly one of the hardest things in my opinion: Graduate high school and get into college. 

This book is instantly a five star in my opinion, but there is an aspect of it that really caught my attention and made me think on a deeper level. 

Rick Riordan has never once sugar coated the olympian gods or their ways. He has had to gloss over many details due to the fact that he was writing a middle grade series, but now that Percy and his audience is a little older he is now getting into the fact that the gods are very much morally f’ed up beings. Like I said, he never shied away from this fact with Luke Castellan waging a war against the gods for being so negligent with their children and Percy having to literally ask them to pay their child support as reward for literally saving the damn world. 

But that is only the tip of the iceberg of things the olympians have done. Take the storyline of Chalice of the Gods for example: Ganymede, the cupbearer of the gods had his almighty goblet stolen and if he does not get it back before Zues notices he is dead. When you look at Ganymede, the first thing you think is that ‘Oh, he has such an easy job, just pouring drinks and he gets to be immortal on top of that. Who wouldn’t love that?’ And then you look at him closely and see that he literally has trauma and PTSD from when Zues abducted him and forced him to become the gods cupbearer. He spends his time in Zues’s shadow being in constant fear of him and being sneered at or ignored by other gods. No one cares about his opinion of whether he wants to be there or not because they think as long as he gets to be immortal, why wouldn’t he love it. 

The main villain of the story, Geras (god of old age), even goes as far to blame Ganymede for becoming immortal as though it was his choice anyway. And lets be real for a second, when the options are either be my immortal servant forever or die, I don’t exactly blame him. Don’t even get me started on Hebe and her childish games. It just sounds like world class victim blaming to me. And Zues was just so slimy to me in the few scenes we saw him in this book. With his inflated sense of ego at a banquet that was supposed to be for his mother and the way he openly leers at Ganymede in front of his wife and other gods was just disgusting. But we all knew he was always a pig

The way the gods acted in this book had my skin crawling and the way they used Percy like he was nothing but their personal errand boy had my blood boiling. He was blamed for his own birth and made to make it up to the gods by getting recommendation letters just so he can get into college with his girlfriend, his father barely offered him any help besides using a sea nereid to outsource actually being a parent, and he was used and abused the whole time by these immortal scum without so much as a ‘sorry’ or ‘thank you’. 

At this point Percy should be allowed to cuss all of them out and Rick Riordan is SICK for continually putting Percy through the wringer like this. In that same vein though, I love it and will be patiently waiting for the next installments of Percy trying to get into college.  

[tayananyx]

Red, White and Royal Blue Review

I sped through the book, not because it was a week before the movie came out, but because it was so good I couldn’t put it down. It had everything I ever wanted from enemies to lovers, to fake (relationship?) friendship, to mutually pinning idiots in love. 

And the premise? Don’t even get me started! It's the international affairs love story of the century. Alex and Henry were so adorable together from the staged meetings to the emails that doubled as love letters. For people who didn’t call themselves a couple they sure went really heavy on the pet names and late night phone calls that lasted hours. 

This book, although a YA contemporary fiction, felt like fantasy to me with an America with a female president and a bisexual first son in a public LGBTQ relationship with a gay prince of England. Throughout the story I kept thinking, “If only it were real…” but alas only in my dreams about this book. 

I was scared to watch the movie after reading even though I saw the trailer first and loved it. Book to screen adaptations are always a 50/50 hit and miss, but when I sat down to watch it on Amazon Prime I was the definition of screaming, crying and kicking my feet. Nicholas Galitzine and Taylor Zakhar Perez brough Henry and Alex to life in a way I didn’t think was possible. Their chemistry was electric and some scenes (we all know which one) I felt like I was intruding on private moments. The movie was the cheesy romcom type that I have missed for a long time and I am glad that this genre is coming back and that the LGBTQ community could have this cheesefest masterpiece of a movie.