The Lost Hero by Rick Riordan

The Lost Hero by Rick Riordan

2010, Disney Hyperion

Series: Book 1 of The Heroes of Olympus

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Rating

Synopsis: Jason has a problem. He doesn’t remember anything before waking up on a school bus holding hands with a girl. Apparently he has a girlfriend named Piper. His best friend is a kid named Leo, and they’re all students in the Wilderness School, a boarding school for “bad kids”, as Leo puts it. What he did to end up here, Jason has no idea — except that everything seems very wrong.

Piper has a secret. Her father, a famous actor, 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.

The Good: When I first heard of this series, I had wondered how Riordan wold make it work after bringing the Greek gods to life. I couldn't see how it would possibly work, as the mythologies are so interrelated. I shouldn't have worried. If I know anything by now, I know that Riordan has an uncanny ability to make world work within one another. That he can take something as huge as an entire cultural mythology and make it work in relation to our world. If he can do that, of course he can mess Greek and Roman mythology into something connected, yet existing outside one another. Going in, I at least thought I knew how Riordan would portray his hero Jason. I was wrong there as well. Jason isn't another Percy Jackson. He's someone else entirely and his journey seems to be working out in an wholly different fashion. The continuation of Camp Halfblood didn't seem all that possibly when the Percy Jackson series ended, but again, I was wrong. Riordan continues the world he created, yet makes it more - adding to it in unexpected ways and only enriching it. Fans of Percy Jackson will be blown away by this series if this initial book is any indication. I plan on devouring the entire thing at once.

The Bad: Not a thing.