okay lowkey this flopped😭😭 sorry😭😭 rick you know I love you but this is not your best work, and I don't just think that because I'm a percy and annabeth groupie!! this is the first book in the heroes of olympus series (next set of 5 books after pjo) and follows 3 new demigods piper, leo & amnesiac jason as they go on a quest to save hera to hopefully get questions on why the gods have been silent/if it's connected to percy being missing. reading this as an adult really opened my eyes to this being flop central. I still remember reading the first chapter of this on a plane in 2015 and being soooo confused and thinking that I bought the wrong book on my kindle but cause we were in the air I couldn't buy the real one😭😭 nonetheless I still enjoyed it. now on the other hand... I didn't find leo hopelessly falling in love with every girl he saw for more than half a second to be charming. I didn't find the plot device of jason passing out after every conflict to be engaging. I didn't find piper's major not-like-other-girls syndrome to be all that feminist. much like the kane chronicles, I think rick riordan/publishers misunderstood what people loved so much about pjo. the people want a slow burn. we want action and we want to see everyone slowly growing to care for each other. I think piper and jason's half-baked relationship was a great concept but executed so poorly, them just pining after each other the whole time was so boring. these guys didn't really feel like good friends in the same way that it did in the og series. everything was just a speed run.

also this is technically a spoiler but not really, the whole roman god stuff was so so obvious and the gang kept running into very obvious traps😭😭 I know that this also happens in the og series but idk maybe it's just more believable because the characters are a lot younger in the first series? idk. 

definitely worth it to read so we can get to mark of athena and house of hades but ngl this was a bit of a snoozefest and when I inevitably reread this series again I will most likely skip this book. 3 stars.