I put off reading this series because I didn't know any of the characters, which I know is bad of me. Instead, I skipped over them and went straight to the Trials of Apollo series because hey I know Apollo. Turns out the books lead on more than I realised and unfortunately, I actually got a fair few spoilers to the Heroes of Olympus series by reading it first. Therefore as soon as I finished the first Apollo book I went straight back to the Heroes of Olympus series starting with The Lost Hero, and now The Son of Neptune.
Percy is confused. When he awoke from his long sleep, he didn't know much more than his name. His brain fuzz is lingering, even after the wolf Lupa told him he is a demigod and trained him to fight with the pen/sword in his pocket. Somehow Percy manages to make it to a camp for half-bloods, despite the fact that he has to keep killing monsters along the way. But the camp doesn't ring any bells with him. The only thing he can recall from his past is another name: Annabeth.
Hazel is supposed to be dead. When she lived before, she didn't do a very good job of it. Sure, she was an obedient daughter, even when her mother was possessed by greed. But that was the problem. Frank is a klutz. His grandmother says he is descended from heroes and can be anything he wants to be, but he doesn't see it. He doesn't even know who his father is.
Can I just say, yay for the return of Percy! After reading the first book in the series 'The Lost Hero' that had mostly all new characters it was sort of a breather returning to Percy's point of view. Almost like returning home after a day of work. Reliable Percy, and by reliable I mean reliable of getting himself into trouble!
However, the first quarter of this book is basically the same as The Lost Hero, because Jason and Percy have gone through the same thing - memory loss and introduced to a new camp. It was easy to read but it did feel a little repetitive. The only difference was unlike The Lost Hero where the main trio were the new people, in The Son of Neptune everyone other than Percy were new characters to learn. Not only that, you now had to learn all the Roman variants of the Gods, which luckily I was planning on doing at some point with my little Greek God obsession so I welcomed.
Once you got over that though it was a good read. Full of challenges and monsters as usual. Something I have noticed, and I'm not sure if it's just because I'm more aware of them now as I was when I read the first series, but it seems there are more nods to the better-known myths than there was in the Percy Jackson series. The PJ series tended to have one main myth that their quest was surrounded by, but in The Heroes of Olympus series there are more little myths they discover on the way as well as the main quest.
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