Title: The Son of Neptune
By: Rick Riordan
Rating: 5 stars
Attention YA authors that want to write stories that add a modern flair to old mythology *coughAimeeCartercough*: Read. This. Book. Actually, read this entire series, and the entire Percy Jackson and the Olympians series as well. This book, this series, is how it should be done.
Over the past few years, I’ve noticed several authors attempting to take the Greek mythology and make it so that the gods are still present in modern society, or some variation thereupon. I’ve also noticed that said stories are absolutely butchering just about everything possible about the mythology upon which they are supposedly based. Now, don’t get me wrong, I have absolutely against unique stories, or using old stories to build new ones. What I do have an issue with is the usage of classic mythology and twisting it until it is unrecognizable and bastardized to be the fodder of some stupid Mary Sue fantasy. For further ranting, see My review of "The Goddess Test."
My point in just giving that soapbox speech is that this book is everything that those other books wished they could be. In the first series “Percy Jackson and the Olympians,” Percy learns that he is a son of Poseidon, the sea god. He attends Camp Half Blood for other demigods where he learns that the Greek gods are real, and that they just follow where the heart of western civilization lies, which at the time of the story is America. Throughout the first series Percy encounters other creatures of Greek mythology, battles monsters, and faces challenges that fill a wonderful story arc that I really must insist on people reading. Where Rick Riordan goes right, however, is that he keeps the mythology true to its source. Even more importantly, he doesn’t make the foolish, inane, STUPID mistake that Hell = Hades!!! In fact, he even has Percy ask that very question in the first book to clarify that they are not the same thing.
Now, some may wonder why I’m saying all this about how well the author stuck to Greek mythology on a book in which the title contains the name of a Roman god. That’s where this second series has started to get good, because it turns out that in the world that this book takes place doesn’t just have a camp for the Greek gods’ children, but one for the children that they have while in their Roman aspect as well...but due to conflicts between the two camps in the past, the young demigods aren’t alerted to the existence of the other anymore. In “The Lost Hero” the first book of “The Heroes of Olympus” arc, Jason, a demigod like all the others, finds his way to Camp Half Blood with absolutely no memory and no idea who he is. What is eventually revealed is that he is a camper of the Roman camp who was taken and brought to the Greek camp for reasons that I won’t spoil here…at the same time, Percy has gone missing…
And that’s where “The Son of Neptune” takes off from. Percy finds his way to the Roman camp, to find that things are a bit different from the camp that he has flashes of memory about. Not much time passes before his friend Frank is assigned a quest, and Percy along with Frank’s friend Hazel accompany them to the land beyond the gods…Alaska. Despite the familiar quest sort of format, this book is fantastic, and the story is shiny and new. If there’s one thing I can say about Mr. Riordan, it’s that he never writes the same story twice. The writing style is engaging, and I wanted to find out what happened stat! For this reason, this book was good for my art homework here in college, as I was listening to it on audiobook and just worked for five hour straight increments…but bad for every other class since I wanted to just get out of class and continue listening. It got to the point that I would listen to it while eating breakfast in the dining hall (although considering that there aren’t too many people to eat breakfast with at 6:30 in the morning, it wasn’t exactly rude…)
Since the previous series was written in first person from Percy’s point of view, his character was pretty darn fleshed out by the time that he gets to this story, but even so he manages to have a decent amount of character development before the curtain fell. It was strange at first to read his character from a third person perspective in “The Son of Neptune” but after a chapter or two I didn’t even notice anymore. Where I think “The Son of Neptune” surpasses the previous book in its series is in the development of new characters. Both Frank and Hazel are very dynamic characters that have sucky lives a plethora of struggles and whose written voice is very clear. The ring of secrets that are kept throughout this book make for some interesting conflicts and since the viewpoint is passed around for the duration of the story, the reader knows more then the characters, which for me just made me want to read more because I wanted to know if they would let spill their terrible secrets, who would survive, and so much more.
Really, even if you have given up all hope on finding decent YA that doesn’t massacre mythology to the extent that it’s unrecognizable, read this series. These books are wonderful for any age, I read the first one in the “Olympians” series when I was in elementary school, and now even as a freshman in college I truly enjoyed the most recent one. The characters are great, the stories are fun, and the world building is fantastic!
Oh, and if you have just seen the movie and decided that these books weren’t for you, read the freaking first book! The movie is fun, yes, but the director took far too many creative freedoms with the plot, and the books are 100 times better (as the books almost always are.)
One last note...check out the cover of this book, it's absolutely gorgeous! John Rocco has outdone himself this time with this phenomenal, visually dynamic book cover. Of all his covers so far, this is my favorite yet!
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