As a fanatic for the Percy Jackson literary universe, I’d read just about anything Rick Riordan puts out, even if the quality of his writing has admittedly been on the decline since the series finale of his “Heroes of Olympus” spin-off. Despite my reservations about “Trials of Apollo” and “The Sun and the Star” –- another set of lackluster spin-offs -– I eagerly anticipated the second installment of “The Senior Year Adventures” after the first came as a pleasant surprise.
This took longer than I’d like to admit to get through. Sometimes I think I’ve grown out of the target audience for these novels, but then I reread the originals and find myself just as moved (if not more) than I was as a kid. For all the humor and easy-to-read language of the Percy Jackson franchise, it’s never shied away from heavy themes of love and loss, life and death, growing up and moving on… the list continues.
I’ll be the first to say I have no problem with the comparatively lower stakes of these books (you can only save the entire world so many times, after all). But that doesn’t mean Riordan can’t delve deeper into the themes he hints at all throughout: Percy’s low self-worth and seeming desire to go to college just to stay with his girlfriend, his anger toward Grover, and his shared trauma with Annabeth after literally surviving Tartarus (essentially the ancient Greek equivalent of Hell). Or perhaps Riordan could focus on Percy’s struggles to figure out what he wants to do with his life; it’s hard to believe he’d be able to so easily walk away from the journeys of his teenage years to a ‘normal’ life. (And does he even want that?)
Despite its flaws, “Chalice of the Gods” succeeds in its exploration of slowing down to appreciate the little moments in life — I can’t say the same about “Wrath of the Triple Goddess.”
It’s not all bad, as it picks up in the second half with the classic PJO action scenes, heartfelt conversation between Percy and Sally -– the most iconic book mother of all time –- about carving out her own path in life and the vision of the “polecat’s” history with Hecate.
But the first half of the novel is pure sludge. While there’s the occasional joke that lands (namely the not-so-subtle digs at Hera’s role in Percy’s hardships), too many pop culture references take me out of the early 2000s and the gross-out potty and underwear humor is frankly disgusting.
“I’d missed my entire junior year thanks to some business we won’t get into (Hera) on account of some meddling gods (Hera) for reasons of a cosmic apocalypse (Hera).”
Riordan,”Wrath of the Triple Goddess,” pg. 2
These minor complaints are just the prelude to more egregious problems.
Our beloved trio –- Percy, Annabeth and Grover -– appear entirely out of character, with Annabeth portrayed as near-perfect in all aspects and the other two propped up to make her look better. Percy’s self-deprecating humor is understandable since everything comes from his perspective, but it becomes grating after a certain point to cast our hero as some fumbling idiot who’s lucky to date someone so far out of his league (which, if you’ve read arguably the best book in the entire franchise, “The House of Hades,” you’d know they’re perfect complements of each other).
In the opening chapters, Annabeth’s college friends treat Percy exactly like that, as if being an architectural genius is the standard for intelligence. Something tells me the Annabeth of the previous books would not have stood for that. Her odd portrayal as a maternal figure (when she’s given the nickname “Mom” and Grover alludes to Percy that she’d make a good mother) despite being a teenager, further alienates us from the person we know her to be. Neither does the audience need constant reminders of her intelligence; she’s proven it time and time again through her actions, but it seems Riordan’s forgotten the art of showing rather than telling. He’s always written female characters excellently, most of all because he sees them for who they are: human. Sweeping away all their flaws reverts us back to almost misogynistic tropes of the “perfect” woman.
If Riordan wants to recapture the hearts of his long-standing audience, he ought to return to his roots and consider what made the franchise so successful in the first place.