This is the third book in The Heroes of Olympus series by Rick Riordan. The book was first published 2012 by Disney-Hyperion Books and the audiobook is narrated by Joshua Swanson. It is a young adult fantasy book that follows a bunch of demigods as they travel across America trying to save the gods from Gaia, the slumbering titan.
The two groups from book 1 and 2 have finally joined up, but everything goes sideways when Leo is taken over and attack the already suspicious romans. They have to flee on their battleship the Argo, with the romans on their tail as they get a quest from Athena to find her statue while Nico, the son of Hades has been kidnapped and is soon dead. The teenagers will have to face long dead demigods, gods and monsters as they venture out to save Nico and find the statue of Athena.
There aren’t many new characters, and the ones who are new has only minor roles for one chapter such as Heracles and the two mercentaurs. The old characters mostly are the same and this book addresses how they handle each other more than developing their characters. Such as how Leo is connected to Hazel, Piper is still insecure about Jason and Jason and Percy is having a main character-who-is-coolest in the background.
Now a problem with having so many characters is that they don’t get as much screentime so many falls in the backseat. That wouldn’t be a problem if the book would just focus on one character’s perspective such as in Percy Jackson but by jumping between at least six characters which include Annabeth, Percy, Jason, Piper, Leo and Frank. I think I remember Hazel as well but as I mention, it’s too many to give a proper storyline.
The author pretty much solves this by having random point of focus for each character. Annabeth is worried about her mom, Percy suddenly thinks he doesn’t do anything despite just having done a lot of thing, Piper still is just focused on Jason, Leo wants to get a girlfriend, and Frank is worried about Hazel liking Leo more than her. I don’t have to tell anyone that none of these are especially interesting or deep. Most of these, such as Percy out of nowhere thinks he is just on the ship despite going of the ship several times to fight gods and monsters, comes really out of nowhere and it feels like the author had very little ideas what to do with the characters.
The storyline with saving Nico, the gods suddenly being schizophrenic and old history between the camp is interesting but the book spend more time doing random monster of the week stuff. Most of it feels randomly thrown in to lengthen the book instead of being an integral part of the story. Considering that the book is already 586 pages long, it would suggest that it could easily have been shortened without anything important being cut.
Overall, I found the story boring. There are some parts I found interesting. Percy and Jason’s interactions were interesting, especially when they use their powers together but this happens rarely and I don’t think they say more than a few sentences to each other which really is a pity. Most of the story focuses on the female’s relationships with whatever male they have a crush on which is just a pity because Rick Riordan is not a good romance author… at all. His “romances” are so stereotypical childish that it isn’t a joy to read. Considering that these are children and normally, hardly anyone had a girlfriend/boyfriend when they where 12-14 years old, I would think that the author falls in to the pit that is the downfall of all child books authors. Which is that adults have no idea how children act. These children feel too old for their ages.
Now, I found this book to have a good start but loosing steam as the book continues on. It doesn’t give me much new outside teenage romances, love triangles and unfocused storyline that can’t determine on what to do with the characters. I would give this one a 4 out of 10, it just isn’t that good and I’m not sure why so many think this is a such a high quality written book. Even if you are a great fan of Rick Riordan’s books, there should be far better books than this one.
With Kind Regards
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