The Last Olympian by Rick Riordan

The Percy Jackson series was a little hit-and-miss for me. The first book was nearly pitch perfect. It was a fast-paced adventure that managed to be inventive and funny and have interesting characters. With each successive book the story moves further and further into the world of the gods. While this seems like a very logical move storywise, it is why I didn't enjoy the next four books as much as I expect I would.

Part of the charm of the first book was the interaction between the world of the gods and the "real world" or world of mortals. That Percy had one foot firmly in each world made for funny situations. This lessens after the first book.

The Last Olympian pits Percy and the forces of good, which include most of the gods and many of the demigods against the Chronos and his forces, which include many of the lesser gods and also a large number of demigods. The final showdown takes place on the streets of New York City.

The Percy Jackson series started off with a bang. The Lightning Thief was excellent, but the rest of the books were not nearly as good. All in all, the series was just okay. It fell way short of His Dark Materials and Harry Potter.

I saw the teaser for The Lightning Thief before the latest Harry Potter movie. It looked cool. I expect that the movies will do well.

My review of The Lightning Thief (Book One)
My review of The Sea of Monsters (Book Two)
My review of The Titan's Curse (Book Three)
My review of The Battle of the Labyrinth (Book Four)

The Battle of the Labyrinth by Rick Riordan

The Battle of the Labyrinth is the fourth book in the Percy Jackson & the Olympian series. The book begins with Percy starting at yet another new school. He is a freshman, and his mother's boyfriend has pulled a few strings and made it possible for Percy to attend the school where he teaches. Percy enters Goode High School hoping things will go well. But Percy is a demigod, who is being hunted by all sorts of monsters, so things rarely go well. After being there for less than an hour, he faces off against a trio of empousai, masquerading as cheerleaders, and ends up setting the band room on fire.

After narrowly escaping the she-monsters, Percy makes it back to Camp Half-Blood, a safe place where demigods spend the summer. He learns that Kronos's army intends to circumvent the camps protective barrier by using the Labyrinth constructed by the ancient architect and inventor Daedalus. (Remember Icarus who flew too close to the sun fell to the earth when the wax holding his wings together melted? Daedalus was his father and the maker of the wings.) The Oracle chooses Annabeth to lead a group into the Labyrinth and try to thwart the attempt to attack Camp Half-Blood.

Riordan employs Ovid's version of the Labyrinth -- a maze of numberless winding passages and turns that open into one another, seeming to have neither a beginning nor an end -- rather than Homer's, which was a maze with a definite path. As he does in the other books, Riordan adds his own personal touches to the mythology here and there. In his rendering, the Labyrinth is connected to the lifeforce of Daedalus. It is a living thing capable of change.

Labyrinth suffers from some of the same problems that books two and three did. It is on par with the last two, neither of which were as good as the first book.

My review of The Lightning Thief (Book One)
My review of The Sea of Monsters (Book Two)
My review of The Titan's Curse (Book Three)

The Titan's Curse by Rick Riordan

I liked the first book of this series a lot, and The Sea of Monsters was a nice follow-up. But The Titan's Curse was not nearly as good as the first two. Much like Order of the Phoenix, in the HP series, we find out some interesting bits to the overarching story in this book, but the pacing and much of the plot just felt off to me.

Riordan relies way to much of "future reveals" as in, "Annabeth looked directly at me. 'Percy, I should probably tell you something.' But our conversation was cut off by Grover who stumbled into the room out of breath." Exchanges like this happen all throughout the book. The info is withheld from the reader, sometimes not revealed at all, sometimes used later for a climactic end to a chapter. I began to find it really annoying.

Another thing that is starting to bug me is that no one ever dies. Percy and his friends are constantly fighting all sorts of monsters and (new as of this book) Titans, but no one is ever killed. Even when is seems like someone has died, you find out twenty pages later that they are not dead. And in most cases, Riordan does not explain how they managed not to die. That was one of the aspects of the HP series that I really liked. When people faced down real danger, they didn't always make it through.

There were still many positives to The Titan's Curse. The plot of the series really begins to unfold in this book. Riordan continues to deftly weave together Greek mythology and the modern world, in ways that are unique and often funny. In the case of Riordan v. Rowling, I side with Rowling on nearly every issue. However, when it comes to humor, Riordan has a slight advantage.

My review of The Lightning Thief (Book One)
My review of The Sea of Monsters (Book Two)

The Sea of Monsters by Rick Riordan

Monsters never die. They are reborn from the chaos and barbarism that is always bubbling underneath civilization, the very stuff that makes Kronos stronger. They must be defeated again and again, kept at bay. Heroes embody that struggle. You fight the battles humanity must win, every generation, in order to stay human.
-- Chiron speaking to Percy

Percy Jackson once again finds himself in the middle of a dangerous adventure, in the second book of the Percy Jackson & the Olympians series. In the first book, Percy is introduced to Camp Half-Blood, a safe place for demigods -- the offspring of Greek gods and humans. Some kids go there during the the summer, and some stay there all year long. Sea of Monsters opens with the camp coming under attack -- somehow its magical borders have been breached -- Grover in danger, and Percy getting kicked out of yet another school.

Percy and Annabeth set out to find and rescue Grover, who is being held by the cyclops Polyphemus (the same cyclops that Odysseus blinded). They are also trying to find some way to restore the tree that protects the boundaries of the camp. They are helped in their quest by Tyson, a young cyclops that Percy befriends and later finds out is his half-brother. Cyclops are are the offspring of the gods and nereids. Clarisse, a daughter of Ares and fellow Camp Half-Blood resident, also shows up throughout the book, sometimes helping, sometimes causing problems. What do you expect from a daughter of the god of war?

Most of the action in the Harry Potter books happened during the school year at Hogwarts. The Percy Jackson books are the exact opposite. The school year is almost completely ignored and the books begins with Percy heading to Camp Half-Blood for the summer. I point out some other similarities between these two series (Riordan wrote his much later than Rowling) in my review of the first book, The Lightning Thief.

If you approach these books with the right mindset, they are a lot of fun.

The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan

Twelve year old Percy Jackson has some problems. He is dyslexic and has ADHD to the max. As a result, he gets kicked out of every school in which his mother enrolls him. His stepfather is a jerk, and he doesn't know his real dad. As the book opens, Percy is on a field trip to the Met with his fellow classmates. Just a typical, boring field trip until one of the teachers turns into a Fury and tries to rip him in half. Percy realizes that dyslexia and ADHD are the least of his problems, when he discovers that he is a demigod -- half man, half god -- and that he is caught in the middle of a war that is threatening to tear the world apart, quite literally.

The Lightning Thief is a quest story set in modern times. The setting moves from New York City to St. Louis to L.A., as Percy works his way toward the West Coast, where the entrance to the Underworld is located. He is helped along on his quest by Grover, a satyr, and Annabeth, another child demigod.

The Lightning Thief is the first book in a five-part series, called Percy Jackson & the Olympians. Four books have been released. If you liked the Harry Potter series you will probably like this book. It is written for the same audience. Riordan even cribs a little from the Potter series. The protagonist in the book is helped by two best friends, a boy and girl. There is mystery surrounding his past. And the Greek-god world exists alongside the mortal world, hidden in plain sight.

I liked how Riordan brought the Greek gods into modern times, updating them, but not fundamentally changing who they are. I am sure he fudges a little on some of the details to make things fit his story, but I don't know enough about Greek mythology to notice.