For those of you who visit my actual blog page instead of reading posts through an RSS feed, you may have noticed that I have had the book The Lost Hero by Rick Riordan over there --> for quite some time. It has taken me an inordinate amount of time to complete a novel written for children. Why is that, you may ask. Could it be that I have the reading ability of a mentally challenged 3rd grader or the average Fox News viewer? No, of course not, dear reader. Unlike them, I can read and form my own opinions on events, reports, and documents.
No, it has taken me so very long to complete The Lost Hero because, to be perfectly frank, it was so very painful to get through. Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I have to say that I read Riordan's first novel, The Lightning Thief, and enjoyed it. His next couple of novels, however, were not as well written.
And now this.
Percy Jackson, hero of the first series is absent, with the role of Hero being filled by a boy named Jason who has no memory of who he is. He is joined by another boy, a son of Hephaestus, and a girl, a daughter of Aphrodite. This combination felt to me like a similar group to that led by Percy in The Lightning Thief. A boy hero, a male friend, a female friend who then travel from place to place, coming into contact with gods/goddesses who want to help or hinder them. With the exception of the names, the plot of The Lost Hero could be swapped out with any of Riordan's other books with minimal effort.
As to the characters themselves, there is little to no character development. We learn a smidge about each demigods' backgrounds but not enough to make you care about them in any way, shape, or form. There is a great deal of whining and complaining about how each character has had a "hard life". Sorry, but I am not interested in reading a bunch of teenagers whine about the world. Besides that, each character shows little personality and are all shallow.
In this novel, Riordan tries to bring in some of the history detailed in The Hesiod: Gaea, Ouranos, the Titans, etc, but he sanitizes it for the kids. For example, the Titan Kronos uses a scythe to cut off Ouranos' genitals while Ouranos lay with his wife Gaea. Kronos throws the genitals into the ocean. The foam that gathers around the floating genitals spawns Aphrodite, who emerges as an adult god from the sea. Needless to say, Riordan's version is much changed, changed to the point of being wrong. And this bothers me, probably because I have 18 university hours in Greek philosophy. I've read The Hesiod. I've read Aristotle, I've read Plato, I've read Aristophanes, and I find it insulting that someone would take these works and cannibalize them as his own. All of his background information in simply lifted from Greek and Roman mythology. Other than sanitizing the sexual elements, his background storylines already exist. What author does that?
All in all, I cannot recommend The Lost Hero. Between the very vanilla heroes and the reused storylines, I found The Lost Hero to be a chore to read and not worth the time I put into it.
