No snarky blog post titles for this one. The Son of Neptune is proof that, even if Riordan isn't necessarily a better writer, he has mastered the art of writing the same book over and over in slightly new and entertaining ways**.
Moreover, this book is special because it's the first one that Sarahmac, Connor, and I each read for the first time, in order, within a couple months of one another so that we could talk about it... The Lost Hero doesn't quite qualify because by the time Connor read it, I'd forgotten Leo and Piper's names and most of the plot. Given that Connor started the school year struggling to read those abominable Henry & Mudge books, seeing him pick up and breeze through Riordan's series several months later has been a joy.
Part of the trick, I think, was finding the right series to start with. In Connor's case, Henry & Mudge have idiotically simple plots (this is a kid who enjoyed the Lord of the Rings at 4, and we've read it to him once a year since), so he needed to discover the Magic Treehouse series as something that was both easy enough for him to read and interesting enough to be worth reading. Then it was "Heroes of Olympus", and now we just need to find the next book.
** this isn't a skill to be sneered at; Riordan is much better at it than Eoin Colfer (if you're barely out of college) or Terry Brooks (if you're my age), for example.
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