The Son of Neptune by Rick Riordan

Book #2 of the Heroes of Olympus series

 

Read book #1 The Lost Hero
and book #3 The Mark of Athena

Rating: Cleaner

Audience: Fourth grade and up. As always, it depends on the child.  There is a good dose of violence, and the complexity of the myths can be hard to follow.

Plot: The book opens with Percy being chased across the country by monsters, which we learn he has been doing for months after waking up with no memory (sound familiar?) and receiving training from Lupa the wolf.  With a little help from Juno (a.k.a. the Roman version of Hera), he makes it to camp Jupiter and gives his new camp-mates a lasting first impression. Classic Percy! He befriends the camp's misfits, Frank Zhang and Hazel Levesque, and the three are sent on a quest to Alaska to free Thanatos, the god of death.

What makes it great?

Book two was awesome because we get to see Percy again!  I mean, it was fun hanging out with Jason for a while, but I missed Percy, and if you were already a Percy Jackson fan before you started reading this new series, I bet you miss him too.

Frank and Hazel really make this book.  They are great.  In the first Percy Jackson series, Rick Riordan  made Percy a defender of all the demigods forgotten and ignored by their godly parents. What I love about this second series is that Riordan himself is championing a new set of under-dogs: the children of the gods we all hate.  In the first book we met Piper, daughter of Aphrodite, and in this book Hazel is the daughter of Pluto (Hades) and Frank is the son of Mars (Ares).  It's still hard to like the gods themselves (though we do see some redeeming qualities), but their kids can be really wonderful.