I took my son to see Rick Riordan yesterday.
Rick Riordan seems like a lovely man, and Kidsbooks did a fabulous job of the event. It was held in the Hellenic Hall (which maybe should have been the Nordic Hall for the occasion) and it was packed to the gills.
My son was SO excited. I can’t properly explain how excited he was. And that, I think, was part of the problem. Because it was a vaguely unsatisfying evening. Which made me think about kids, expectations, celebrity, and the problems with balancing the three.
My son is a super-fan. But he’s also nine and was one of the youngest at the event. So he was thrilled to be pointed toward a free T-shirt table, then crushed to find the T-shirts in adult sizes. And he practically dislocated his arms clapping and cheering when a sword-fighting Viking emerged from the wings and ran around the auditorium. Then he was seriously confused when the Viking took off his wig and turned out to be a thin, bald man.
“Is that him?” he asked me repeatedly, comparing the bald Viking to the author picture on the back flap of The Hammer of Thor.
No, as it turned out. The Viking was a publicist, who — after neglecting to introduce himself — proceeded to give prizes to kids who tried to answer questions such as: How many weeks has Percy Jackson been on the bestseller list? How many countries have rights to Rick Riordan books? How many copies of Uncle Rick’s books have been printed?
The publicist had a strange idea of what might interest young readers.
When the real Rick Riordan finally emerged, he was warm, engaging, and funny. But he spent about twenty minutes on a slideshow which was basically an advertisement for the books released in 2016 and those coming in 2017. Again, my son waved his arms frantically trying to ask a question during the Q&A portion of the evening, but of course only a dozen of the hundreds of kids in the room gained their 30 seconds at the microphone.
Then the event was over, and we all went home.
I was thinking this morning about what would have had to happen for my son to be as ecstatic at the end of the evening as he was at the beginning. First, that sword-waving Viking would have had to be sent to Ragnarok. (Sorry, publicist.) And Rick Riordan would have had to personally shake my son’s hand, look into his devoted little eyes, and say “I’m so glad you love my books.”
I admit, that’s probably unreasonable.
So then I thought about what I expect when I go to see my favourite authors speak. I know I’m not going to get personal interaction. But I go to hear them reading in their own voices. I go hoping to hear wisdom — words that will keep me thinking in the days to come. And I go for inspiration. When I leave, I want to feel eager to start work on my own stories.
Both the overprotective mom and the writer inside me would have liked all those things for my son.
But he went home clutching his signed copy of the new Magnus Chase book, and he read well past bedtime. So maybe he’ll find his wisdom and inspiration in the pages, instead of the performance.
For the record, his question was going to be: “How do you come up with all those amazing chapter titles? They’re my favourite part.”
