Returning from sleep-away camp, my teenage daughter, who’d hitherto declared reading a foreign pursuit, announced that she was now a “bookie.” Ruthlessly suppressing my inner jig, I nodded casually and asked how this literary epiphany had come about. A cabin full of reader-girls, it seemed, had turned her on to Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series. And so it came to pass that, over the next few weeks, my child holed up at the library and indulged a burgeoning obsession with Greek mythology.
So it was in a spirit of knee-bending gratitude that I took the teen to a screening of Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters, the second (and, to judge by its open ending, far from the last) episode in a young demigod’s quest to rise to all manner of occasions.
I haven’t read Riordan’s well-regarded novels, and anyway these days most movie fantasies for kids — stacked with souped-up special effects in place of character and story — aren’t really my bag. Nor had I seen Chris Columbus’ Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief, which blew away the box office but won middling reviews.
So I’m happy to report that Percy Jackson Part Deux is a fetching mix of whizz-bang CGI and full-blooded classical storytelling. Deftly directed by the gloriously named Thor Freudenthal (Diary of a Wimpy Kid), Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters brings back Logan Lerman, who charmed our family to bits as a lovelorn sensitive soul in last year’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Here, Lerman plays the titular son of Poseidon, a busy guardian of the seas whose inattention has dropped his offspring in a heap of self-doubt, despite his successful rescue of the world in the first movie.