Review: Heroes of Olympus:Son of Neptune

Background

My favorite guilty pleasure is young-adult novels that I can plow through in a day and a half (or several particularly boring class periods). One of my favorite series that I've digested in the course of a week is the Percy Jackson series by Rick Riordan. Percy Jackson follows the adventures of the eponymous hero, a modern day demigod and son of  the Greek God Poseidon, as he attempts to stop the titan Kronos from taking his throne back.

The short series concluded and Riordan now comes out with his sequel series, The Heroes of Olympus. The first book of the series, The Lost Hero, introduced new heroes and focused on the disappearance of Percy Jackson and the discovery of Roman demigods, namely the scion of Jupiter named Jason Grace. The second novel shifts focus back to Percy Jackson as he struggles with amnesia, lost in the mythological world of the Roman demigods.

Review

The Percy Jackson series relies on riffing on classic mythological concepts and bringing them into the modern world (previous books have featured the entrance to Hades in Los Angeles, Mount Olympus in New York City and Hera's Garden in Oregon). In this book, Percy Jackson finds himself in the Roman demigod camp located in Berkeley after being pursued by a pair of gorgons. On arrival, his motivations are questioned and he must venture North to Alaska to challenge the threat of the titan Gaia and her giants.

Riordan paces the book fairly well but it feels like we have tread the same ground before in his previous book, The Lost Hero, which featured an amnesiac demigod switching sides and attempting to stop Gaia. It's handled competently but the plot feels a bit recycled.  Moreover, it suffers from the series' previous issues of relying on the source materiel to the extent that anyone familiar with it should be able to predict the outcome of the story.

Still, for a young adult novel, Son of Neptune is uncompromising. The efficient military brutality of the Roman demigods is brought into the forefront and we never cut away for brutal monster deaths. By the same token, the Greco-Roman gods aren't altered to make them more "kid-friendly" and appear in their wild, cold and borderline sociopathic glory. Caught between vicious threats from the titans and the bitter indifference of their divine parents, Riordan makes it very easy to sympathize with the demigods.

Flaws aside, Son of Neptune is very well done and a worthy addition to the Percy Jackson stable. Definitely worth a look for younger readers and even I, a twenty-one year old college student, managed to enjoy it.