Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series was enchanting but imperfect, and it’s follow up, the Heroes of Olympus series, has thus far continued in this same vein, with its inaugural installment, The Lost Hero. Percy was all about the Greek pantheon, and Heroes is about their Roman counterparts, but Riordan is not one to ignore a potential goldmine of kid-friendly drama like the various gods and goddesses of badass Egyptian mythology.

Hence, The Kane Chronicles.

The book is told alternately by 12-year old Carter Kane and his younger sister, Sadie. Their mother died in mysterious circumstances some years before the commencement of our tale, and Carter has spent the intervening years traveling the world with his archaeologist father while Sadie remained in the care of the pair’s maternal grandparents in London. On one of their twice-yearly family visits, the Kane kids are taken by their somewhat skittish Dad to the British Museum for a special showing of the Rosetta Stone (yes, the Rosetta Stone) on Christmas Day. But this is no mere viewing, oh no. This is actually a magical ritual enacted using the power of that magical, mystical artifact to – if I understand things correctly – open a portal into the netherworld and return the Egyptian gods to our plane of existence.

Um, excuse me, Mr. Archaeologist Dude? Have you read any Egyptian mythology? Those guys were nuts! (And not just the one called Nut.) I mean, even to anyone whose chief information on those gods comes from Stargate SG-1 knows not to mess with Osiris and Apophis and the like. But okay, whatever, it’s your life. Do as you will… Even if it does mean that you shatter the priceless Rosetta Stone and then disappear, leaving your children alone to face the wrath of the authorities and a mysterious, underground organization of magicians of which you and your late wife were a part, and yet never told them about at all. (Oh, yeah. Dr. Kane: Father of the Year.)

Of course, in any tale of kiddy heroism such as this one, there has to be some reason to get the adults out of the way of the story; no good twelve year-old adventurer is worth his salt if he has a mother or a father hanging about to make him brush his teeth and put on a sweater when it gets chilly. These kids have to be on their own and at a disadvantage and working against the clock in order to save the world. It is the formula of almost all such fictional endeavors, and if there is one thing Riordan’s children’s/YA work does not do, it is stray from a winning formula.

The Kane kids? SO special. The end of the world? Imminent. The vague, pre-pubescent romance that begins with snarky backbiting? Check. An inhuman but hugely entertaining sidekick? Absolutely: in this case, a fricken goddess!

All clichés present and accounted for, then.

I liked this book. I liked it a lot. I liked the way it condensed a complex mythology into a useable plot structure (“The gods follow patterns. In some ways, they are quite predictable: acting out the same squabbles, the same jealousies down through the ages. Only the settings change, and the hosts.”). I loved the occasional flashes of very real humor (like when Sadie complains that our nominal bad guy’s house is on the “obvious much” rue de Pyramides, in Paris, Carter retorts “Maybe he couldn’t find a place on Stupid Evil Magician Street.”). I dug the concept of an underground institution as old as the Pyramids that has used magic to guard the world from the lls of living, breathing Egyptian deities. And I especially liked the throwaway line about how the Kanes, being so closely tied to Egypt, were to stay out of Manhattan, which “has different gods”. (Hello, Percy!)

Yes, I enjoyed The Red Pyramid a lot. But there can be no denying that this is very much same ol’ same ol’ from Riordan, as he takes the successful elements from his (and others’) past work and transmutes them into a similar story, only laying it upon a different back-story.

On the other hand, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right?
 
   -- Rachel Hyland