Review: The Lost Hero (HOO #1)

Le Héros perdu by Rick Riordan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The first thing of note about this new series of Riordan’s is that he switched from a first person narrative to a third person one, which I have to admit I regret. Percy’s voice in the PJO series was really well done, rung true, and gave the serie an instant air of uniqueness even before you got tot he actual plot and character development.
The change can be explained by the presence of several narrators, as the book is shared between three POVs (Jason, the new protagonist, Piper, and Leo), and that would have been harder to pull off in first person so despite my personal tastes, I don’t resent the book for it.

Jason’s introduction is well-handled enough to make you forget that the ‘I don’t remeber who I am’ part is a bit of a cliché–and one that’s explained by the end of the book anyway. Piper and Leo are both very interesting, although Leo’s jokes aren’t always the most savory, but I have hope it’ll get better with time.
Character wise, they’re easily distinguished from Percy and Annabeth, even after the addition of their guardian Satyre–which is a problem that can appear with spin off series. Riordan doesn’t fall into that trap though, which is very appreciated.

The worldbuilding works well, and Riordan’s explanation as to why we never heard about Camp Jupiter in the previous series makes sense, so that’s a neatly-handled retcon that doesn’t cause any major plothole that I can think of. Very appreciated indeed.


My main complaint–and the reason this book only gets three stars instead of four– is that the levels of sexism kind of escalated when compared to the PJO series.
Where almost all the major players in PJO had alive mothers–and Percy’s relationship with his mom was a loving, strong and respectful one–here pretty much all of the mothers are fridged. The addition of Piper and her brief passage in the Aphrodite bungalow also brings more girl-on-girl hate, sexist remarks and mandatory beauty…and that’s before I even go in the borderline slut-shaming remarks sprinkled through the books, which I really did not appreciate.

I mean, it’s 2015. It’s more than time to stop inserting sexist ideas in our kids’ books, please, and thank you.