The Mark of Athena

Ok. Whew. 

It took me almost 10 minutes to find this blog again. Thank God Google runs my life. 

Over the past few years I've had trouble keeping up with how many books I've read (I'm pretentiously keeping count), so I hope that writing a short review about it will help me remember. 

I would like to dedicate them to my friends Yes-I-Get-The-Most-Reading-Done-In-A-Dark-Room-Don't-Tell-My-Mom Book Club member, Yelena and Don't-You-Dare-Tell-Anyone-I-Have-A-Blog Dan. 

So this week I read The Mark of Athena by Rick Riordan. I've read all of Riordan's books and I what I like about them is what I usually like about most YA/Juvie novels, good pace. Kids these days are ADD and I'm an adult who can proudly say, "where is my iPhone?!? I must click something on it now!!". So I can appreciate wanting to keep the readers attention. Short chapters, also a plus. 

What really sets it apart though is that it's informative without being preachy. I don't need preachy. I'm a mother-fucking ADD-ult (who reads kid's books). This year I also read a book penned by Riordan, the first novel in The 39 Steps series. Now that, was preachy. Apparently there's a fine line. In The 39 Steps, the children had to solve clues based on the life and history of Ben Franklin. At the end of the book, the next set of clues were to be centralized over Mozart. I cannot pinpoint WHY the facts and learning was so heavy handed in the 39 Steps and not in the Percy Jackson books, but perhaps it was in character development. A know-it-all sister is more likely to bash you over the head with knowledge than for a group of ADHD teens who are scrambling to remember every bit of knowledge about a foe before it destroys them. 

The Mark of Athena was a typical good Riordan ride. Plenty of action, character development, and forward motion toward the final battle without skipping over the mini-boss battle on the way. Riordan has really honed his Gladius penning these novels. They are strong, but not overtly formulaic, entertaining without being incendiary, suggestive without crushing the imagination. 

The weakness most prominent was the number of characters. Riordan does a fine job recapping what we read last year, but it does take a long time and with 7 major characters and a legion of minor ones (deities both Greek and Roman, bad guys, good guys, satyrs) it gets a little muddy. Riordan does a good job balancing the action between the main characters (each chapter is narrated by one of them) but it's just barely all worked clearly in my brain. By then he had to gloss over some possibly interesting secondary story action in order to build a well paced climax. The secondary characters also get a little under written: a satyr who only wants to kill things and watch mixed martial arts, a set of twin giants who want to be in show business, a too-proud spider. Riordan has a tendency to boil down, possibly too far.