okay so when the pjo show was announced I decided that I would begin an entire reread of all of the riordanverse and get back up to date (I stopped reading after the second trials of apollo book) in anticipation for the show and also because I never read magnus chase and I wanted to actually finish the trials of apollo. at the end of last year I finished the original series (definitely the best) which means that it's time for kane chronicles! um. what to even say. if you handed me both of these series and only told me that they were the same author and nothing else, I would assume that rick riordan first wrote the kane chronicles, then took notes about what worked and didn't work and then used that as a basis to write pjo. like it just seems like a worse draft of percy jackson. and not even in a " ancient gods are real" way. cause I'm not.upset that this is egyptian percy jackson, it's a fun concept and the magic system and hierarchy of the gods is different but the story beats are the same.

even down to the opening scene being at a museum where some monster from that mythology attacks the main character and then having a parent death and then having the first book end with the parent coming back cause omg surprise the parent didn't actually die.

like was there nothing else you could think of😭😭 also I think the romance in this series flops so hard. what's so good about the original pjo is that you get the natural build up of annabeth and percy throughout five books of their friendship. that's why people like them so much! tbh I think rick saw how much shipping does free marketing for a series and wanted to shove it in there and then introduced zia and anubis specifically for the purpose of them being love interests and then barely develops them and the romance is literally just "main character sees them and thinks they're hot. now they're in love" huh???. so yeah. we'll see how I find the rest of this series cause I haven't read it since my the first time in 2015 so we'll see if it gets better. 3.25 stars for now.