Not being much for reading blurbs, reviews or advance press for books I know I am going to read anyway (I live in fear of spoilers, which I know is a bit rich, considering I dispense them with impunity in pieces such as this -- I am cool with my own hypocrisy), I came into The Lost Hero completely cold. Oh, given its cover and series title, I figured Riordan was taking a trip back to the well he found full to overflowing with his wildly successful Percy Jackson and the Olympians series, and therefore expected more mythological YA hijinks. I even thought maybe we’d be returning to Camp Halfblood, that haven for demigods situated conveniently in the US North East. But I did not for one minute think I might be seeing Percy Jackson.

At the end of Percy Jackson and the Last Olympian, the fifth book of young Perseus’s adventures, he and his cohorts had successfully defeated an attempt by the Titan Kronos to retake the planet into his not so gentle care and bring the Olympian gods (now holed up atop the Empire State Building, don’t you know) down. Percy and longtime crush, Annabeth, wise daughter of Athena, had finally gotten together, and the world seemed safe for Ancient polytheism once more.

But The Lost Hero shows us that a demigod’s work is never done. Because now, yet another powerful entity is stirring, a force even more primal and malevolent than the last Big Bad, and the only way it’s to be defeated (it seems) is for the children of the Greek gods and the children of the Roman gods to work together to overcome this, their greatest enemy.

Wait, what’s this? Roman gods? But… aren’t the Roman gods just the rebooted versions of the original Greek gods, co-opted as their own when the two religions merged thousands of years ago? (I hear you exclaim.) Yep. And that is why the two sets of demigods, each bunch conceived when their promiscuous parents were in their alternate guises, have been kept apart and ignorant of each other for so long.

This comes to an end when an amnesiac boy whose name, he is told, is Jason, awakes on a school bus. People claim him as friend -- notably best-friend Leo and girlfriend Piper -- however, the Mist (which is the magical concealment that prevents mere mortals from noticing all the godly wackiness that apparently goes on right under our very eyes) has been at work, and he had in fact only just been transplanted into their lives. He wears a purple shirt (believe me, this is important), successfully defends himself from the monster that inevitably attacks him with a magical sword made of Imperial Gold (rather than the Celestial Bronze of Percy’s magical sword) and -- after he arrives at Camp Halfblood and has been clued into the fact that he is the son of a god -- constantly refers to the various members of the Pantheon by their Roman names. (Jupiter for Zeus, Juno for Hera, Venus for Aphrodite, etc.). But no one can seem the fathom the mystery of who he is, why he might know the arcane things he knows, or -- almost incidentally -- where Camp Halfblood’s premiere Hero, Percy Jackson (who went missing right around the time Jason showed up) might be.

I, meanwhile, had worked it all out by half way through Chapter 2. It’s kind of disconcerting that I am so pleased that I know more about Roman mythology that a troupe of fictional teenagers.

So, anyway, there’s a bunch of kind of silly questing that happens, a few quite exciting encounters with danger, a whole lot of pining over slightly too-perfect Jason by Piper (who is, it transpires, a daughter of Aphrodite), and some amusing comic relief provided by tech-whiz and son of Hephaestus, Leo. We end on a semi-triumphant note, with the battle won but the war just beginning, and a whole lot of foreshadowing about how much the Roman and Greek god-kids hate each other, possibly dating back to the days of Athens V. Sparta…

I loved it.

Sure, I was occasionally frustrated by the unconscionable amount of time it took anyone in this book to work out what was going on. Seriously, guys: Google. Additionally, I was once again kind of annoyed that all of the kids in this book are so very defined by their parents -- yes, they’re gods, but seriously, what is this, feudal England. (Even if your Dad’s a blacksmith, you don’t have to be a blacksmith anymore, guys!) And I still continue to find Riordan’s characters a little one-note; certainly, less than complex.

Nevertheless, this book was still a really fun time, full of delightfully twisted mythology and more than the occasional chuckle. It’s absurd, yes, but in a really wonderful way, and I find myself impatient for the next installment. How long, I wonder, will it take the two separate groups of demigods to get acquainted and start to work together? For how long will Percy be lost? Are the kids of Camp Rome just as worried about Jason’s whereabouts? When will these lost heroes be found?

’Cause, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde: to lose one hero may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness.

  -- Rachel Hyland