Do we like Rick Riordan?
Our score: 9 out of 10. Years of backing diverse readers and a cast under fire, no harmful words found; the record on his conduct is thinner than on his books.
Rick Riordan was a middle school teacher before he was a bestselling author. The Boston-based writer says he started with a classroom's worth of readers in mind, and he still aims his books at what he calls 11-year-olds. That teacher streak runs through everything he does, down to wanting reading to feel like something kids choose.
The Lightning Thief and its Percy Jackson sequels made him a household name, and Disney+ turned them into a streaming series that he and his wife help produce. He also runs an imprint, Rick Riordan Presents, that hands the microphone to other storytellers. For a former teacher, that is a pretty on-brand way to spend a fortune.
The nearest thing to a scandal is the 2022 stoush over casting Leah Sava Jeffries, a Black girl, as Annabeth Chase, a character described as white in the books. When fans piled on, Riordan wrote on his website that critics were judging her solely on how she looks, and that the series' message is that difference is strength. He put himself in the firing line for a young actor, which is exactly what you want from the bloke behind the franchise.
On the harm check, we found nothing nasty from him: no campaigning against LGBTQ+ people, women or migrants, and no slide into conspiracy theories in the sources we read. In 2018 he answered a critic of the inclusive characters in his novels with a fixed-up version of the complaint and a note that he was happy with his sales. In 2020 he said he feels a responsibility to do right by his readers and make them feel safe.
We also looked for lawsuits, fines and formal allegations and found none in the sources we could open. There was online noise about a blog post of his on the Israel-Palestine conflict, but only low-quality sites carried it and we couldn't see the original, so we're leaving it out. That's the honest limit of what the record shows.
The recent news is a new Camp Half-Blood series, set between the first two Percy Jackson books. Each of the four novels is written with a different co-author: Annabelle Oh, Kyle Lukoff, Jade Adia and Pablo Cartaya. Handing the keys to a fresh crop of writers fits the same instinct as his imprint.