I’ve been having some doubts about the Trials of Apollo series. It doesn’t have a terribly interesting heroic character or group, it seems to rely too much on the popularity of previous series’ characters and events, and the plot’s been dragging for two books so far. I was ready to give up after this one. I’m still not sure, so maybe that’s in favor of The Burning Maze?
Apollo, Meg, and Grover are still searching for oracles to free and evil emperors to defeat. They’ve already encountered and survived two, but not really defeated Nero and Commodus. The third emperor is revealed here and I have to admit that even though we don’t really get to meet Caligula, I kind of like how he’s characterized, as not actually crazy but as really astute. This could, if handled well, make for a really good eventual confrontation. The worry for me is that I still don’t care for Apollo/Lester or Meg, and I really doubt that Grover will get to be the one to defeat the final boss. This means I want the villain to be good, but I don’t like any of the main two heroes well enough to want them to win. Maybe there will be someone new introduced in the next book who will be more interesting and worth rooting for.
I’m also not quite sure what’s going on with the oracle rescues but that’s seems to be really in the background. Maybe that’s part of the problem, that the main quest is not really the focus but rather just surviving the villains. Accompanying this problem is the real lack of development in either Meg or Apollo/Lester. Maybe bringing back the focus on the oracles and the actual rescuing of them would be helpful to bringing some meaning or reason to keep following the series.
So the big surprise here is that Rick Riordan actually kills off a main character. Sort of main character who certainly is described as genuinely, permanently, actually dead. More of a main character from the Heroes of Olympus series who gets brought in as a side character here, only to die in a rather uninformative way. Usually when you kill one of the good guys, there’s clear reason and purpose, and that’s not quite as clear as I’d like. Yes what {spoilers} does is stay behind so that everyone else can escape, but given what other information about what {xxxx} has been suggested, offing them without real detail just seems a little pointless.
Ha! I had the opposite reaction to you and thought this novel was an encouraging sign that he was back on track because I wasn’t annoyed. Of course, before this, the last Riordan I read was the third Norse novel which felt so I completed to me.