Samantha Noa

This book feels like fan fiction, with only some small passages feeling like it belonged in canon. There were mythological and lore mistakes, a lot of distracting typos, and the voice of the story just didn’t feel like Rick’s. It was insanely distracting, and it pulled me out of the story completely. I understand that he didn’t write most of it, but it feels like nobody bothered to edit it or re-write or consider how narrative voice would affect this story. Rick has a simple vocabulary whenever possible, which was totally not the case here. The word “dichotomy” was used and it pulled me out of the story completely because it’s not a word Rick would ever have used, even for his most intellectual characters, which Nico and Will are not, making it odd that this word would be in their thoughts. If it had been written in first person perhaps the voice issues would be so jarring, since we’ve never had a book from Nico’s personal POV. This should have been written first person to avoid the jarring incongruence between the voice in this book and in Heroes of Olympus, where Nico was a POV character in third person voice. This book does an excessive amount of telling and not enough showing. They literally have a “this is what we’ve learned” discussion at the end, a cliche Rick managed to avoid in the past by keeping most of the characters’ observations in the internal monologue, and keeping dialogue centred on interactions that are impossible to summarise without missing vital information. Overall, the plots progression also feels a bit sloppy. Rather than monsters and enemies being obstacles that happen to be in the way, they’re all in a conspiracy together under the specific orders of one person. It just feels like they’re stumbling blind through trap after trap rather than having any strategy, and every defeat of these monsters is usually a matter of brute force rather than trickery and cleverness, which is how things usually go. It’s not that this is an awful book, it’s not that there’s anything so so wrong with it, but it doesn’t meet the standard of a Riordanverse novel, which is what it’s been marketed as. I’m surprised Rick put his name to this. If you’re dying to know what happens with Nico it could be worth it. But I don’t think I’m going to re-read this book again, and the other books are on a constant rotation.