The Blood of Olympus
Author: Rick Riordan
Publish Date: October 7th, 2014
Series: The Heroes of Olympus #5
Number of Pages: 516
Genre: Middle Grade, Fantasy, Adventure
Though the Greek and Roman crewmembers of the Argo II have 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.
Review
THERE WILL BE SPOILERS IN THIS REVIEW
I’ll put this out there right now. Please don’t kill me for it.
I finished this series only for Nico.
In my honest opinion, the first series far outshines the spin-off. For one, the characters and writing were both better in the Percy Jackson series than in this one.
So now, The Blood of Olympus.
I felt like the characters were different. This might be due to my foray into YA more than Middle Grade in the past year, but this time around, I felt like they were much more childish and out of character than I remember them being. Leo’s humor was much more obnoxious (to the point that it wasn’t funny) than I personally remembered. I felt like their characters were so unlike what I remembered them being. And Nico. Although I loved finally getting to read his POV, I couldn’t help but feel like his personality was originally portrayed as being so much more complicated than it ended up being. On top of this, he kept teasing us and saying that there were characters that were going to die and we all kept bracing ourselves for the heartbreak we’d feel when one character died. We were all expecting to cry and feel the pain BECAUSE of what happened in The Last Olympian. We expected sacrifice and pain.
I got none of that.
Riordan killed off none of the seven. Leo “died” but drank the potion. His sacrifice was supposedly “noble” and enabled him to be able to return to Calypso, but as a friend, shouldn’t he at least give his pals back at Camp Half-Blood a heads up?
But honestly, this wasn’t the most prominent issue it had.
The Blood of Olympus was very very dull. It takes forever for them to get into the battles and all of the individual problems. I’m pretty sure the only thing that kept me reading were Nico’s POVs. The buildup is so big that the payoff is disappointing. Obviously we knew that Gaea was going to be raised. If not, then the big battle would not have happened. But the way that Gaea was raised, due to Percy’s nosebleed, was so anticlimatic. The entire book was anticlimatic. I was expecting something like The Last Olympian, a great long book all about the battles and desperation of war. I was not happy with the one to three chapters, from like THREE POVs, out of all of the ones in the book. The entire book felt rushed and like a cop-out compared to what everybody in the fandom had been expecting.
Speaking of which, that ending was so not okay. There was literally no falling action that showed what happened after the battle. I mean, yay for summarizing everything, but I would sincerely like to know what the characters do. Some of them had great endings, but the rest? Not so much. What happens to Percabeth? What happens to Hazel? What about Frank? Please tell me.
I understand the appeal of a dramatic ending but this is the LAST book. I need some closure.
I also had a problem with the writing. It read like a fanfiction in some places and it felt like there had been no planning. Personally, when I try to write stuff that has many characters I do try to get a description of what every person is doing, but sometimes, it just ends up being tedious. In The Blood of Olympus, every single character’s actions during a battle were described in great detail. I love having the ability to visualize everything, but in this case, I felt like it detracted from my overall enjoyment of that particular scene and ruined the feeling of the battle.
If you don’t get what I’m talking about, here is my lovely demonstration.
The giants were coming. The ground shook as they rose from their positions and advanced on the demigods.
Frank (insert action and something to do with an animal transformation)
Percy (insert lengthy action and reasons why this POV thinks he is amazing)
Annabeth (insert action something about her fierce eyes and dagger)
Leo (insert action about tools)
Nico (insert something about dark shadows and skeletons)
Jason (insert action and something about power of Zeus)
Continue that for every single character in that battle and you get a good idea of what the scene ends up looking like.
Nico’s ending is fabulous. A little OOC, but I really liked that Riordan gave him a happy ending.
Now I’m always refreshing the Solangelo tag on Archive of Our Own and Fanfiction.net
Leo’s ending is also great but I didn’t like how the book cut off right after it. I wanted to see him return to Camp Half-Blood and have a similar return to how Percy came back in Battle of the Labyrinth. Either way, he and Calypso are so adorable together.
If there is any indication of the quality of this book, it’s that my ten-year-old brother didn’t get through half of it because he was bored.
2/5 Stars
Author: Robin Talley
Dancing Through the Pages 