Sunday, June 26, 2022

"The House of Hades" by Rick Riordan

 Continuing with my rereading of Riordan's works, we have The House of Hades. I completely forgot until I popped the book open that it started with an apology from the author for the previous cliffhanger that the book before this one left on. It isn't part of the story, but I think it's really nice when an author has a sense of humor about the pain that he's leaving us in!

The book starts with Percy and Annabeth making their way through Tartarus. Along the way, they meet up with an unexpected ally, Bob the Titan. He used to be a bloodthirsty enemy, but after Percy dunked him in a river that forces you to lose all of your memories, he now only remembers the demigods as friends. This is a really nice subplot, it allows the book to get into the morally gray areas of both the heroes and the villains. Is Percy good for taking away his memories? Is Bob now good if he's helping them?

While that's going on, the other demigods are trying to make their way to the House of Hades, where they'll meet Percy and Annabeth. As part of the journey, Jason makes the decision to not be Roman anymore and throw his lot in with the Greeks (and his girlfriend). In the process, he makes Frank a Roman leader to take his place. Leo also gets lost and ends up on Calypso's island, where Percy was a few books ago. He ends up falling for Calypso and swears that he'll make it back to break her free. This is another plot point that I much appreciated, as it gives some continuation of Calypso's story and let's Leo have his own thing going and stop being the seventh wheel in their group. Plus Nico is revealed to be gay, with a bit of a crush on Percy. I had totally forgotten that this part of the story existed, it was nice to revisit and see some queer content!

Eventually the two stories come together at the end and are successful in shutting the doors to Tartarus. But they now have an even bigger battle ahead of them (of course) so they sail off to finally confront Gaea. Hooray for more books in the series!

My favorite part of the book was the part that deals with the morally gray area, of course. While Percy and Annabeth are traveling with Bob, he's continually forced to question his past, and how he feels about it. Percy is now regarded as a friend, true, but he hasn't visited Bob at all over the years until he fell into Tartarus and accidentally asked for his help. Does that mean he's still a friend? And how does Bob fit into his larger Titan family, some of whom he meets along the way? What I really like about this is that the demigods are shown to have flaws, and not be perfect victims here. They cause a lot of harm in the world as well with their adventures.

Plus there's the gay representation. I forgot about this, and I hope that it gets fleshed out more in the coming books (I'm pretty sure it does). Right now, it's a sad gay Nico pining after Percy, and ideally there would be more queer joy there than this. But I'm happy right now with the idea being introduced and we can nitpick later after this plotline is more fleshed out.

Onwards to the next book! I'm excited to see what we have in store as I have almost completely forgotten these later ones.

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