The Lost Hero (The Heroes Of Olympus #1), by Rick Riordan

There is an essential problem with this book that suggests that Riordan has not learned the lesson of his problems in previous volumes, showing that while he can write a lot of books and write them pretty quickly, he doesn’t understand how the mythos of his fantasy world relates within the shared universe.  The author relies on cliche and seems to think that Percy Jackson is a sufficiently interesting character that he can carry a book even when he is absent from the book’s events, as is the case here.  This book has a “lost hero” that makes a whole in this book’s plot, where it is not revealed into the very end that he is having to get along with some Roman demigods who are far more harsh than the Greek demigods that the author’s previous work focused on.  Of course, this is all said by the characters, since the only Roman demigod we see is Jason, who doesn’t appear to be that harsh and unkind at all.  Instead, he appears rather milquetoast and bland, not even managing to be the most compelling story in the novel where he is reputedly the leader.

This book is more than 500 pages and it is not as interesting read as one would hope.  Jason and two other demigods are being taught by a satyr at some wilderness school for troubled kids (And why are troubled kids with ADHD assumed to be demigods?  Talk about pandering to one’s reading audience!), and of course monsters show up.  And unsurprisingly the three heroes become a party, are recognized by their parents, and have a hopeless quest that involves the return of Greek (and Roman) myth in the present, only this novel serves to muddy up things further by positing that Greek and Roman demigods are kept separate, that the Greek gods and goddesses that have populated the series have Roman aspects that are more severe and less fun and more militaristic, and that the Greek and Roman demigods who don’t even know each other yet are going to have to cooperate in order to defeat the efforts by giants and Mother Earth to destroy Mount Olympus and wipe out civilization on earth.  Of course, the heroes in this book are successful and there are more tearful reunions as well as potential future relationships, but the characters here are just not as appealing because Jason can kill just about anyone, Piper can charmspeak her way out of trouble, and Leo can jerry-rig together some sort of technical solution to problems while falling for every beautiful girl who is out of his league possible.

Of course, Percy Jackson is the “lost hero” in this book, who is being searched diligently by his girlfriend Annabeth, who has her own problem given her father’s treacherous support of Loki in another series that is going on at the same time as this one is.  There are a lot of problems with the mythos of the author, and one of the chief ones is that the author does not realize that the stakes of the author’s works are lowered by the expansion of pantheons and heroes, since the author does not hold to an overall ultimate God whose divine providence governs the universe and sorts out all of the various inconsistencies that result from the author’s resolute refusal to accept ultimate authority in his universe apart from himself.  And so this book is full of people blacking out so as to prevent the author from having to convey some of the more deus ex machina elements of the book’s plot, and that really is a disservice.  In general, this book’s plot is somewhat of a retread, even a bit of a retro-con, and the lead characters just aren’t colorful enough to save this from mediocrity.