Wednesday, October 29, 2014

The Blood Of Olympus

The Blood of Olympus by Rick Riordan

This is the fifth book in The Heroes of Olympus series, which is a sequel series to the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series.

If you don't want anything spoiled about Percy Jackson stuff, just don't even look at this. DON'T LOOK AT IT.

I have reviewed all the previous books by Rick Riordan concerning Percy Jackson. Links below.

The Heroes of Olympus:
Percy Jackson and the Olympians Series:
Book #1: THE LIGHTNING THIEF
Book #2: THE SEA OF MONSTERS
Book #3: THE TITAN'S CURSE
Book #4: THE BATTLE OF THE LABYRINTH
Book #5: THE LAST OLYMPIAN

Further disclaimer: If you have not read this book yet and would like it remain unspoiled, DO NOT READ THIS BLOG POST. I'm just going to lay it all out on the table and leave it there. Proceed at your own risk.

MORE DISCLAIMER: I'm not going to spend time going over stuff from previous books unless they are excessively relevant to this book. If you want to know more about the series, I've read and reviewed all the books. Just go click some links. Go to Amazon. I'm not messing around with grand scheme summary....kind of...

An amazon summary to get things moving, "Though the Greek and Roman crewmembers of the Argo IIhave made progress in their many quests, they still seem no closer to defeating the earth mother, Gaea. Her giants have risen-all of them-and they're stronger than ever. They must be stopped before the Feast of Spes, when Gaea plans to have two demigods sacrificed in Athens. She needs their blood-the blood of Olympus-in order to wake. 

The demigods are having more frequent visions of a terrible battle at Camp Half-Blood. The Roman legion from Camp Jupiter, led by Octavian, is almost within striking distance. Though it is tempting to take the Athena Parthenos to Athens to use as a secret weapon, the friends know that the huge statue belongs back on Long Island, where it might be able to stop a war between the two camps.


The Athena Parthenos will go west; the Argo II will go east. The gods, still suffering from multiple personality disorder, are useless. How can a handful of young demigods hope to persevere against Gaea's army of powerful giants? As dangerous as it is to head to Athens, they have no other option. They have sacrificed too much already. And if Gaea wakes, it is game over." AMAZON LINK OF JUSTICE

In the last book, The House of Hades, Percy and Annabeth escaped from the Underworld, met up with the group, and are puzzling over the best way to be fully prepared for the battle to stop Gaea from waking. Nico, Reyna, and Coach are dragging the giant statue back to Camp Halfblood to hopefully heal the rift between the Roman and Greek demigods. 

I'm not going to skirt around this at all; I was pretty disappointed in The Blood of Olympus. It delved into a lot of useless backstory, every character seemed to be the same narrator voice from time to time, and when there was action, it was so brief it was barely worth noting.

Even sitting here and typing up this book review, I'm having trouble remembering the finer details of the book because it's forgettable. The narrators spaz skipped around, some characters got their traditional, funny, one line quips; but there was something really lost in this book.

I just didn't care anymore. There was nothing holding my attention because it was so flat.

Don't get me wrong, there were neat moments of the book, but a lot of the narration shifted to the Nico/Reyna/Coach direction, which just seemed as centrally important as what was happening with the other crew. Again, don't get me wrong, I like Reyna, and Nico was just 100% badass terrifying everywhere. BUT THEY SHOULDN'T HAVE BEEN SUCH A FOCUS OF THE BOOK.

So, at the end, there's of course the giant battle with Gaea and everybody and their mother, but it was still so short, and the same run of the mill stuff as before.

It feels like it was over in three pages. SUPER SPOILER - none of the main characters even died which seems to be half the point of having a book with multiple narrators! HUGE what the heck at that.

There was such a massive build up from all the other books, and yeah there was the whole Annabeth and Piper being awesome friends (SUPER COOL YEAH) but, all the other characters were just left out to the dust. Like seriously, I question if Hazel or Frank were important, like ever.

I just can't even muster enough to care about writing out a full blog post for this book, which is a SUPER tragedy because I enjoyed so many of the prior books!

I watched another person be angry about this on youtube, and I related so well. It's definitely You can find that HERE. She said everything I want to say better than I am able to at the moment.

Because I just can't even.

I'm out.

Happy reading.

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