The Lost Hero (Heroes of Olympus #1) by Rick Riordan (Juvenile Fiction)

Jason has a problem. He doesn’t remember anything before waking up on a school bus holding hands with a girl. Apparently he has a girlfriend named Piper. His best friend is a kid named Leo, and they’re all students in the Wilderness School, a boarding school for “bad kids”, as Leo puts it. What he did to end up here, Jason has no idea—except that everything seems very wrong. Piper has a secret. Her father, a famous actor, has been missing for three days, and her vivid nightmares reveal that he’s in terrible danger. Now her boyfriend doesn’t recognize her, and when a freak storm and strange creatures attack during a school field trip, she, Jason, and Leo are whisked away to someplace called Camp Half-Blood. What is going on? Leo has a way with tools. His new cabin at Camp Half-Blood is filled with them. Seriously, the place beats Wilderness School hands down, with its weapons training, monsters, and fine-looking girls. What’s troubling is the curse everyone keeps talking about, and that a camper’s gone missing. Weirdest of all, his bunkmates insist they are all—including Leo—related to a god.

Stars: 4/5

This book was just as good as the Percy Jackson series. I actually might even like this series better, I’ll let you know when I finish. Percy Jackson was all about defeating the monsters and saving Olympus, where as this book is about defeating monsters and uniting Olympus (I won’t get more into it than that because, well spoilers). The twist is right in front of you the whole time, and maybe it’s just me, but it was also just out of reach. I feel like I should have seen it coming, but I didn’t quite put two and two together. Leo, Piper, and Jason are the leads in this though Annabeth, Thalia, etc, all make appearances (which I loved), all three have secrets they are keeping to themselves, which of course all end up coming out by the end. I think my favorite thing is Riordan didn’t try to make this trio like Percy, Annabeth, and Grover; they were very much their own people. These books do lack some of the humor that the Percy Jackson books had, but I feel like the situation is also more serious. I also really enjoyed the Roman aspect of the gods and not just the Greek versions. If you read the Percy Jackson series I would highly recommend following up with this series, if you didn’t read the P.J. series I suggest you do first before this series as there are references of things that happened that you won’t understand unless you read Percy Jackson first. I can’t wait to get through the next couple of books in the series, hopefully by then the finale book will be out!