Wednesday, May 13, 2015

Review: The Lost Hero

Title: The Lost Hero (The Heroes of Olympus #1)
Author: Rick Riordan
Publisher: Disney-Hyperion
Year published: 2012
How I got this book: I bought it at The Strand in 2013
Why I read this book: I've read Percy Jackson and the Olympians by Riordan, and I really enjoyed them. Also, my favourite thing to read about must be Greek Mythology. 
My rating: 4,5 stars

Goodreads synopsis: Jason has a problem. He doesn't remember anything before waking up in a bus full of kids on a field trip. Apparently he has a girlfriend named Piper and a best friend named Leo. They're all students at a boarding school for "bad kids". What did Jason do to end up here? And where is here, exactly?

Piper has a secret. Her father has been missing for three days, ever since she had that terrifying nightmare. Piper doesn't understand her dream, or why her boyfriend suddenly doesn't recognize her. When a freak storm hits, unleashing strange creatures and whisking her, Jason and Leo away to someplace called Camp Half-Blood, she has a feeling she's going to find out.

Leo has a way with tools. When he sees his cabin at Camp Half-Blood, filled with power tools and machine parts, he feels right at home. But there's weird stuff, too  like the curse everyone keeps talking about. Weirdest of all, his bunkmates insist that each of them - including Leo - is related to a god.

My thoughts: I enjoyed this book from page one. This is a middle-grade book, and I honestly like reading middle-grade. They are fast paced, and never boring, and a great way to get out of a reading slump if you're in one. While The Heroes of Olympus is a series of it's own, it is also following the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series. We have three new main characters, and we alternate between whose point of view we're reading. I have never read a book with 3 POVs before, and in this book at least, I really like it. Each of the characters are so complex and have such an important backstory, that I think this is the best way this could have been told.

As I mentioned, the characters here are complex, and I can't wait to read the rest of the books in the series to see how they evolve. Leo was probably my favourite character to read as, I just enjoyed experiencing the story from his perspective. I mostly liked all of the characters, but Piper annoyed me quite a bit some times. I won't go into great detail, because I don't want to spoil anything, but the way she felt about Jason and that she was so sure she would get him eventually. 

Something else that I thought was great was the fact that we meet old characters again, like Chiron, Thalia and Annabeth. I wasn't the biggest fan of Annabeth in the Percy Jackson series, but I quite liked her now. And Thalia as well, and it was interesting to see how the stories of the new characters intertwined with the "old" ones. 

I flew through this book, and enjoyed every page of it. I didn't want to put it down, and read the entire thing in a couple of days. I don't have any of the other books right now, but I think I have to buy them when I'm going to the States this summer. 

This is a book I would recommend to anyone, even though this genre may not be their preference. It's easy to read and follow, and it's very fast paced. 


Have you read The Lost Hero?

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