Hey everyone! Happy Saturday! How're you all doing today? I'm quite well. I spent the entire morning sitting outside and reading and I got to chapter eleven in the fifth Percy Jackson book, The Last Olympian. But that's not what I'm here to talk about today. I'm here to talk about the fourth Percy Jackson book, The Battle of the Labyrinth which came out in 2008. So let's get right into it.
The closer I get to reaching the end of the series, the more I'm amazed at how much fun these books continue to be. Continuing with the comparison to Harry Potter, while the Percy Jackson books continue to be fun and still manage to be interesting, the Harry Potter series lost it's sense of fun around the fourth book, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, because J.K. Rowling somehow wasn't able to write books that were both fun AND compelling at the same time. I mean, yeah Percy has had some really bad stuff happen to him in these last couple of books, but the tone has been pretty well balanced between dark and horrible, and light and funny. I think that might just be because of Rick Riordan's tastes. Whatever the case is, I think it works wonderfully.
While The Titan's Curse is still my favourite book in the series, The Battle of the Labyrinth is a close second. Probably because everybody from the main cast is on the quest in this book as kind of a last ditch effort to save the world before Kronos's resurrection. Percy is there (obviously), Grover is there, Annabeth is there and Tyson is there and it's wonderful since they all haven't been on a quest together before as a quartet. Which is bonkers to think about.
FINALLY!!! Annabeth was given the chance to lead a quest. This is something she'd been looking forward to since The Lightning Thief and it's glorious. Okay, yeah the quest went to crap pretty quickly, but she didn't do any worse than Percy, Clarisse, and Thalia in the previous three books because their quests went to crap pretty quickly too. And that's just the nature of storytelling. You can't have a quest or mission that goes off without a hitch, especially when that quest or mission is the main plot of a book or movie otherwise you're going to have a REALLY short book or movie. For example, the Avengers couldn't beat Loki when they first fought him at the beginning of The Avengers or the movie would've been over and could've been a TV special or something like that. My point is that the problems Percy and his friends faced during this quest were not a reflection on Annabeth's ability to lead them.
I realize I've been gushing about how awesome this book is, but there is one more thing that I thought stood out about this book. Grover finally found Pan. He'd been looking for Pan since The Lightning Thief and so to have that plotline get resolved is pretty cool to see. Especially since it pretty much consumed Grover's life up to this point, even over his other duties as a Satyr.
There aren't really any new characters in this book that I like, aside from Rachel Elizabeth Dare. Mind you, aside from her, not alot of characters introduced in this book carry over to the next one. At least not so far anyway. And I'm about halfway through the final book. Rachel is pretty cool though. Like Percy's mom, Rachel seems to have the ability to see through the Mist, which is the barrier the gods put up to shield mortals from the monsters and other beings from their realms. And also to hide Mount Olympus from sight too. Which makes her a valuable ally to Percy and his friends in this book. Although she somewhat reminds me of characters like Iris West and Mary Jane Watson, who know the identities of superheroes and are involved in their work due to their relationships with one superhero in particular, but isn't one of them. I say somewhat because she has some power that allows her to see through the Mist. I wonder how that will play out in the fifth book.
One thing that I'm tired of with these books is the amount of backstabbing and betrayal there are in them. Whatever happened to good old bad guys who don't try to worm their way into the life of a hero in order to kill them for their leader? Every superhero TV show and movie, not to mention every fantasy and science fiction series does this. I realize it's meant to be a source of drama, and it works really well in this series, but it's a bit predictable at this point. Can't writers find some other source to get the drama from?
The dynamic between Percy and Annabeth has become much more romantic in nature in this book. Neither of them will admit they like each other in that way, but the tension between them is the highest I've ever seen it be so far. And honestly it's not as bad as some of the other will they/won't they romantic subplots out there. The worst being Clark and Lana on Smallville, but I'll talk about that another day.
The most chilling scene in this book for me, and this is where the spoilers come in, is when Kronos is resurrected and takes over Luke's body, effectively giving us a clue as to why Luke survived his fall after Thalia kicked him off a cliff at the end of the previous book. Though we don't find out completely why he survived the fall and why his body survived the takeover by Kronos until the fifth book. It's a little cliche, but I'll touch more on that in the next review.
Once again, this was a great read. I'm having alot of fun reading the Percy Jackson series and I'm a bit sad that the next review will be the final one. At least for now, because my sister doesn't have the later series like The Heroes of Olympus, The Kane Chronicles, Magnus Chase, or The Trials of Apollo. I'm going to do my best to track those books down as well as my own copies of Percy Jackson & The Olympians because I have a feeling I'm going to be returning to these books more than once.
Alrighty that is going to be it for me for this week. I'll be back on Monday for my review of the final Percy Jackson book, The Last Olympian. And then on Wednesday I'll have another comic book review for you, and then on Friday I'll be reviewing Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle. In the meantime though have a wonderful rest of your weekend and I will talk to you all later. Take care.
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