The Hidden Oracle
Rick Riordan
** WARNING THIS REVIEW DOES CONTAIN SMALL SPOILERS**
“How do you punish an immortal?
By making him human.
After angering his father Zeus, the god Apollo is cast down from Olympus. Weak and disorientated, he lands in New York City as a regular teenage boy. Now, without his godly powers, the four-thousand-year-old deity must learn to survive in the modern world until he can somehow find a way to regain Zeus’s favour.
But Apollo has many enemies—gods, monsters and mortals who would love to see the former Olympian permanently destroyed. Apollo needs help, and he can think of only one place to go… an enclave of modern demigods known as Camp Half-Blood.”
If you know me, you know I am a huge fan of Rick Riordan’s work, Percy Jackson being my absolute favorite book series ever. I have always been a mega (I just wrote down ‘meja’ for some reason. My brain is fried 0.0) Greek mythology fan, so as a tiny little sixth grader Percy Jackson; Sea of Monsters was my new life blood, hands down (yes, I accidentally started on the second book, don’t judge me).
Well, I’ve read the first Magnus Chase and all of the other Percy Jackson books (Olympians and Heroes), and absolutely loved them. So, when I heard that there was going to be a new book, with the Percy Jackson characters, from the point of view of forced-to-be-human Apollo, I was absolutely ecstatic. I got my hands on the book and gobbled up the first 25 pages before having to trickle to read the rest of it.
I was a mixture of sorely disappointed and extremely pleased.
Now let me explain.
Basically, the summary is that Apollo fell to Earth and is now a human, and a couple people want him dead (for absolutely no reason in his knowledge), but he also has no idea how to live without his powers. He meets a little girl named Meg, and they go and find Percy Jackson himself. Percy gets them to Camp Halfblood and it’s half surviving what’s left of the camp and half finding stuff to do a quest.
It was a really good book in the aspect that the action and dialogue and character interactions were extremely well written, as always. And the sarcasm was absolutely delightful. Even two of my favorite characters are, one, alive, and two, now main side characters!
The parts I didn’t enjoy, though, ruined the entire book for me.
Although it might have been hinted to in the Blood of Olympus book that Will Solace and Nico DiAngelo were gay, I hoped against hoped that all the fangirls were just making stuff up from nothing. The Hidden Oracle confirms that, in fact, they are very, super gay. They don’t kiss right out, but they flirt and all tons of other nonsense that had no place in the book at all.
(Note: I am very against homosexuality due to my beliefs, and I’m not going to push that onto any of you, and I am not hating, but I’m giving my completely honest opinion)
It was just really hard to read because of that, and even slightly disgusting to me. Even Apollo was bisexual. One time he was like, ‘I might steal her from him, or him from her. Who knows?’ and it just… it put me off.
Besides that, he had a strange tendency to over describe or describe things that weren’t necessary. Like, do I want to know the giant, bronze statue is buck naked? No. I do not. Do I want to know that you were so frightened that one of you peed yourself? No. I do not.
It’s not that it wasn’t done tastefully or anything, it just seemed really jarring and like he was trying real hard to do something that wasn’t normal for him.
Unfortunately, I probably will not read the second book, but we’ll have to see what happens.
My score…
/ 10
So… yeah.
How’d you enjoy it? What did you think? What other books would you like me to review? Make sure to comment below so I can get to ya!
Comments