The main stories involve fighting monsters and the myths of the ancient Greek gods but in every book there is a growing-up, coming of age theme in a way that is totally appropriate to the age of the characters and to the readers. It is a small part of the books.
Leo would like a girlfriend but wonders if he would ever get one and he thinks he is not good looking. Hazel is attracted to two boys for a while and we think she will have to choose. Percy is attracted to Annabeth but is jealous because he suspects she is in love with Luke. There is another girl who is Percy's friend but not his "girlfriend" and Annabeth seems to be jealous.
The characters just might kiss briefly or hold hands. All girlfriend/ boyfriend relationships are among characters of about 16 years of age or older, except for Hazel and Frank (Hazel is about the same age as Nico (it's complicated), Frank is 3 years older). Percy and Annabeth flirt a little but finally become a couple when they are 16. The other love interest for Percy is a mortal friend called Rachel, this causes confusion for him.
This level of romantic interest is right for the age group, it is what we would see in PG films and on the Disney channel and there is no reason why it should be exclusively about opposite sex attraction.
In the real world many readers will have some same sex crushes, the readers who do not experience such feelings will certainly have friends or other children in their school who do have such feelings.
In the House of Hades, part of the Heroes of Olympus series, there are 7 demi-gods on the quest plus Nico. With such a large number of teenagers in the books the author would be doing us all a great injustice if he were to ignore the possibility of same-sex romance.
In House of Hades it is confirmed that Nico had a crush on Percy when he was younger (there is 3 years age difference between these characters and Nico is now 14). The evidence leads us to think Nico is in love with Percy and those feelings are current.
The story is not as simple as saying Nico is embarrassed or ashamed of his feelings because he is gay. He may have those feelings because Percy is already in an established relationship. This is the first time the author has dealt with the issue of attraction to someone who is spoken for. It will be very interesting to see how this develops in the next book, due to be published October 2014.
Well done Rick Riodhan.
There should be a gay teenager in the Percy Jackson books because there are teenagers in every school class who have these feelings and face these issues.
A minority of parents find this objectionable for various reasons:
- they do not approve of gay relationships
- they do not think children should know such relationships can exist.
Overwhelmingly children of this age know more than some parents may imagine, as for approval, there is much in the books that such parents probably would not approve of the clue being that they are fantasy fiction based on Greek myths. Approval of homosexuality is becoming irrelevant in many countries where gay people now enjoy the protect of the law against discrimination and can now get married.
I just found an article written in 2011, the writer is asking for exactly the sort of book that we have with this series. It is interesting that she tells us a good number of writers have tried to publish books with gay characters but have been prevented. Read it here:
http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/12/why-so-few-gay-characters-in-teen-fiction/?_r=0
It is by KARIN DELL'ANTONIA
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