Mario the lone bookwolf's Reviews > The Red Pyramid

Not as good as Percy Jackson, Riordans´new series uses the same, great concept with reduced effort of the author to make it as great for all audiences as his Greek Roman mega world bestseller.
The reasons:

Riordan could have simply invested more lifeblood, beta readers, and sweat in making this one the same thrilling, funny, and entertaining read as Percy Jackson, he should have already made enough money at this moment to be able to take some time for finetuning. It´s especially unnecessary that the quality has been reduced, because the concept of using high plotted and detailed, well scripted and planned storylines, enabling many laughs and interconnections to make it seem much more coherent and vivid, really isn´t that much of a problem in that genre. It´s not as if it was high fantasy of hard sci-fi or something.

I am missing the humor of the first series, it´s funny too, but not close as well executed and especially not aimed at all audiences at once, hidden innuendos for the adults and pure, clean fun for the kids. That´s coming in combination with the fact that it´s not that fast plotted, no tour de force of ideas and settings, and especially personifications of the ancient deities, letting the readers wonder how which god might appear in modern times. This kind of reminds me of Gaimans´ American Gods series that could have also lived up better to the expectations.

Taking away or just reducing this element, the extra layer, the bonus dimension, of making it a bit brainier with hidden criticism and connotations, downgrades the whole thing to one´s average kids/YA read, nice and sweet and all, but nothing special anymore, just not the original, not the trademark Riordan was able to establish himself as.

I am, of course, vivisecting it from the perspective of a strange kid in the body of an adult, so it might still be the perfect read for kids, teens, and real adults who aren´t into that meta analyzing anything to death and overcomplicated comparing it until it falls into pieces. It´s still a mess that Riordan deteriorated his perfect recept by diluting the ingredients that made it great for unknown, or the suggested, reasons. Remember Schlitz beer? It´s never a good idea to reduce the effort.

And I don´t know another kids, YA author who didn´t deliver the same quality of got better and better,
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...
etc.
which makes it seem even stranger.

Or maybe just the first part had exposition problems, it´s his only average novel, I just somehow subjectively and unscientifically didn´t really like the characters, and it will lift off with the second if one believes the meta rating scores? However, I am still totally looking forward towards reading the
https://www.goodreads.com/series/8221...
https://www.goodreads.com/series/1620...
series.

Tropes show how literature is conceptualized and created and which mixture of elements makes works and genres unique:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...