“The Lost Hero” by Rick Riordan

I’m continuing on my Rick Riordan revisit with this next series about Greek and Roman gods. Very exciting. So this is the first installment of the Heroes of Olympus series, and it’s in the same universe as the Percy Jackson series, but Percy isn’t the protagonist anymore.

What’s interesting about this series is that Riordan has changed up the structure. There isn’t one main character now, there are in fact three now. This book follows around Jason, Piper, and Leo. Similarly, the chapters aren’t titled amusing lil descriptions of the actions in them, they’re just called the character’s name who is narrating. Boo for the boring titles, but makes sense from a writing perspective. And it makes sense because this is a series that Riordan is writing as a more experienced writer, he wants to include more perspectives and viewpoints in his characters so he includes more point-of-view characters.

To summarize: once again this book follows Jason, Piper, and Leo. Jason wakes up with no memory in the back of a bus with Piper and Leo. This is a bus with 3 demigods on it who don’t know who we are, so naturally it gets attacked. They end up at Camp Half-Blood and figure out that Piper is a daughter of Aphrodite, Leo is a son of Hephaestus, and Jason is a son of Jupiter. Hold up though, Jupiter is the Roman form of Zeus, what’s up with that?

Anyways the three of them all go on a quest to rescue Hera, the queen of the gods, who is being held captive by a giant. Along the way they battle some storm spirits, save their satyr friend Coach Hedge, and rescue Piper’s dad who has been kidnapped by another giant. They run into Thalia (who you may remember from the Percy Jackson series) and it is revealed that Jason is Thalia’s brother. They battle the final giant together and emerge victorious. Only once they return to camp is it revealed that there’s an entirely separate camp for children of the Roman gods that Jason is from. The Roman and Greek demigods have a bloody history, so they have been separated. And it is likely, that Percy Jackson, who has been MIA for this whole book, has been sent to the Roman camp in exchange for Jason.

So the idea behind this book is quite cool, it’s very similar to American Gods where the gods can exist in different appearances and personalities based on what the population thinks they are like. So one god can have both Greek and Roman personas (so Zeus and Jupiter). It’s an interesting way to expand the world, Chiron alludes to the American Civil War being between Greek and Roman demigods. And that during the war against the Titans in the Percy Jackson series the Roman demigods took the Titan mountain on the west coast while the Greek demigods defended Mount Olympus.

And as I mentioned earlier, a strength to this book is that there are more voices and more diversity. Piper is a member of the Cherokee tribe of Native Americans, while Leo is Hispanic. They also are the children of Aphrodite and Hephaestus, two gods who we haven’t seen much of until this point. It’s cool to see how he brings in their families and stories about religion and spirituality into how they think about the Greek gods and this new family.

Honestly, the part of the book that I can’t stand is how Jason and Thalia are siblings. It feels forced and pretty unnatural. Thalia never mentioned having a sibling, supposedly because her mom lost Jason when he was very young, aka she gave him to Hera as an offering and Hera got him to the Roman demigods. And when they meet up Thalia keeps just talking to Jason unnaturally…? As in she knows that he lost his memory but keeps being all mysterious about where they should meet up, insisting that he knows where it is because their family went there. It feels like something a god would do to be all mysterious rather than Thalia, who is a demigod. And has been annoyed with gods previously for being mysterious on purpose like that. Also there could have been no connection between the two and the story would have worked just fine, didn’t need that bridge between the two camps. But we’ll ignore this and just keep going.

What’s clever about this is that Riordan takes a break from Percy for the installment book, gets readers interested, and the next book in the series (The Son of Neptune) is all about Percy once more. It’ll be nice to hear from him again!