| | |  | POETRY | | Home » » | | | | | | | Product Details: | | | Author:
| Rick Riordan | | Hardcover:
| 400 pages | | Publisher:
| Disney Hyperion Books for Children | | Publication Date:
| May 05, 2009 | | Language:
| English | | ISBN:
| 1423101472 | | Package Length:
| 8.3 inches | | Package Width:
| 5.8 inches | | Package Height:
| 1.4 inches | | Package Weight:
| 1.2 pounds | | Average Customer Rating:
|  based on 229 reviews |
| | | | Customer Reviews: | |
Average Customer Review:
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My son really liked it!!!Mar 13, 2010
My son loved the entire series of these books!!! Lots of fun and adventure, which many nights, kept him up a little too late to see what was going to happen!!!
Awesome seriesMar 09, 2010
I will admit that I only became aware and interested in this series when the ads for The Lightning Thief movie came out. I read the books and I thoroughly enjoyed them all, including the Last Olympian. It was a fitting end to a great series.
Great BookMar 06, 2010
I received the book the day after I ordered it. It is a good finish to the series.
Most awesome book EVER ! ! !Mar 05, 2010
The Last Olympian is the greatest book EVER! On the first page I was hooked. I heard Rick Riordan was planning to make a new Camp Half Blood series that is coming out in the winter. Percy and Annabeth are gonna be a bit older and he`s basing the series on new people. An Egyptian series is coming out too. It`s called the Kane Chronicles. Have fun reading the Last Olympian!
1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
 Leave the root beer and monster dust behind, pleaseMar 04, 2010
Hailed as the second coming of Harry Potter, demigod Percy Jackson and his gang of Greek myth sidekicks has now splashed onto the silver screen. I haven't seen the movie yet, but I have read all five books of the series, including the final one, The Last Olympian.
Like the profitable Potter series, each book features an adolescent hero battling the forces of evil with magic. Numerous battle scenes, a splash of romance, hair-raising scrapes with monsters, prophecies, clueless adults as well as adults who seem to get it--these are the market-tested elements found in both series.
Percy Jackson seems aimed at slightly younger audience than Potter, and is also not quite as long and involved. Author Rick Riordan employs breezy American dialog and cultural landmarks, and his scenes are less dense and complex than Rowling's. By and large, the prose is snappier and flows better--Riordan was a published mystery writer before taking up Percy, and it shows.
Up until The Last Olympian, that is. Alas, Riordan falls under the WOW (World of Warcraft) syndrome--where a battle scene gets stretched out for page after page, with made-for-CGI monster after monster getting dusted (literally) to the point of boredom. The problem, from my point of view, is that after too many impossible escapes, protected by his Achilles-like invulnerability granted by a dip in the River Styx, Percy's actions get repetitive. Yawn.
There's killing and mayhem, but it all seems so sanitized: war as an adventure park, not a bloody mess. Thus instead of bleeding, monsters simply disintegrate. This is done to placate the parents of younger children, but it detracts from the story. Another example of this is when a bunch of satyrs show up in Manhattan, and in order to get psyched up for battle they drink root beer. Please.
Riordan does gets high marks for appealing sidekicks Grover the Satyr and Tyson the Cyclops, as well as an off-again, on-again romance between Percy, son of Poseidon, and Annabeth, daughter of Athena. He is quite clever at using various elements of Greek mythology throughout, although I notice that the chthonic gods Dionysus, Demeter, and Persephone are vastly toned down and, in the case of Demeter and Persephone in particular, flat as cardboard. I suppose the darker elements of Greek myths--and there are plenty--need to be tamed for younger readers, but it leaves an unappealing taste in my mouth.
Another other thing that bugs me about the series is the American hubris factor. The idea that the Greek gods decided to abandon Greece (and, apparently, other countries as well) for the cultural wellsprings of the U.S. strikes me as preposterous. I'm convinced that he put Olympus, the seat of their power, over Manhattan as a selling point to the New York publishing industry. Whereas the evil Titans based their headquarters on Mount Tam near SF. Come on, Rick, you can do better than that! (Spoken as a Bay Area resident, here.)
Oh, and then there's the ridiculous notion that a summer camp of teenagers is capable of holding off the forces of evil and saving the world--it's like, instead of bombing Pearl Harbor, the Japanese bombed a high school in Hawaii. While Percy and the other heroes battle the bad guys, the gods conveniently abandon Manhattan to the teens in order to merely slow down a humongous monster halfway across the country disguised as series of superstorms. Meanwhile, the muggles have no clue why New York is totally trashed.
Muggles? Drat. I meant mortals.
Finally, since this is the last book in the series, how successfully does Riordan tie up the loose plot ends? Mixed marks here. The love triangle between Percy, Annabath, and a mortal with special powers named Rachel Elizabeth Dare gets resolved nicely. The crux of the story--how the evil Titan Lord Kronos is defeated--is a bit trickier. It all has to do with a Big Prophecy and how Luke, a former camper and son of Hermes, became possessed by Kronos. It gets a bit philosophical near the end, kind of a nice contrast to the oodles of monster dust all over Manhattan. I was a little confused and I'm not sure I buy it all, but I did care about the main characters at the end, so Riordan must have done something right.
At the end of the book he refers to this as the "first" Percy Jackson series, and the author says he's working on a new one. I probably won't read it, unless he leaves the root beer and monster dust behind.
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