The Lost Hero by Rick Riordan

The Lost Hero by Rick Riordan

Book One of The Heroes of Olympus series by Rick Riordan

 

(taken from Amazon.com)

Jason has a problem. He doesn't remember anything before waking up on a school bus holding hands with a girl. Apparently she's his girlfriend Piper, his best friend is a kid named Leo, and they're all students in the Wilderness School, a boarding school for "bad kids." What he did to end up here, Jason has no idea-except that everything seems very wrong.

Piper has a secret. Her father has been missing for three days, and her vivid nightmares reveal that he's in terrible danger. Now her boyfriend doesn't recognize her, and when a freak storm and strange creatures attack during a school field trip, she, Jason, and Leo are whisked away to someplace called Camp Half-Blood. What is going on? 

Leo has a way with tools. His new cabin at Camp Half-Blood is filled with them. Seriously, the place beats Wilderness School hands down, with its weapons training, monsters, and fine-looking girls. What's troubling is the curse everyone keeps talking about, and that a camper's gone missing. Weirdest of all, his bunkmates insist they are all-including Leo-related to a god. 

Rick Riordan, the best-selling author of the Percy Jackson series, pumps up the action and suspense in The Lost Hero, the first book in The Heroes of Olympus series. Fans of demi-gods, prophesies, and quests will be left breathless--and panting for Book Two.

From the same author who wrote Percy Jackson, this is a follow-up series that begins just months after the final battle in the Percy Jackson series. I actually must admit, I loved this series more, probably because the characters are older, and so the sarcastic jokes in its narration are correspondingly wittier. I initially loved Percy Jackson for its witty, sarcastic narration, and this book takes it to a new level, despite the absence of Percy as a narrator.

In the first of The Heroes of Olympus series, you don't meet up with (or at least, not for long) the main characters from Percy Jackson; instead, you get introduced to three new demi-gods: Jason, Piper, and Leo. Much as I missed Percy's sarcasm, and Annabeth's wit, and Grover's, well, Grover-ness, I really enjoyed getting to know these new three on their own. Leo, especially, is hilarious. He has this unflappable, almost pompous obnoxiousness that is as much aggravating as it is entertaining,  but throughout you get glimpses of the real person hiding underneath the humor, showing that his character is not what he presents himself to others. Piper's character, by the same token, teaches an age-old but still much-needed lesson to female readers about beauty, which I very much appreciated. 

I liked that two of these three main characters were children of other Greek gods and goddesses that we had not seen up close. In the Percy Jackson series, the main demi-god characters were associated primarily with other gods and goddesses, so it was nice to see kids in other cabins represented. I there there was a underlying lesson in there about how people can come from different backgrounds, but each has free will and potential to be a kind, caring, courageous hero. In Percy Jackson, there's a limited representation of campers from different cabins, and this kind-of removed the prejudice surrounding some of those other cabins.

The pace of the book was such that I really blew through this one--even by my reading standards. By the end, though, I had pretty much figured out what the "swap" (spoiler alert) was, and who else was involved. Riordan, I think, fully expected his readers to figure it out, because it became rather obvious and clearly set up the second book in the series. 

Overall, I give this 8/10 stars. The only thing really missing, was Percy and Annabeth, but that is to be expected, especially since we need to get to know some of the other new characters well before all seven of them go off on a journey together starting in book three. As far as monsters and battles go, however, this book had a lot more "monsters" that I could picture well in my mind without them feeling very odd and unreal, like some of the ones Percy met in the first series. Most of the adversaries that Jason, Piper, and Leo have to face seem much more human in mystique (possibly because many are minor gods, goddesses, and demi-gods themselves, rather than monsters), which made their battles feel more real and believable, and which I liked. They also travel to some cool (no pun intended; honestly) places (read: Quebec city--see cover art!).

Overall Rating: 8 / 10 Stars 

Fun fact: The Heroes of Olympus series (along with the preceding Percy Jackson series) is being made into a series of graphic novel adaptations. The Lost Hero has already been released as of 2017, and the others are forthcoming. I'm not super into graphic novels myself, but a lot of my students are, so I'm trying to read more of them. This is one of those opportunities where I've been using the graphic novels to hook students into the stories, and then encouraging them to read the regular novel version once they've gotten a taste. (More graphic novel reviews are to come, P.S.)