The Son of Neptune is the second book in The Heroes of Olympus series, the follow-up series to the Percy Jackson and the Olympians books. If you have read The Lost Hero (if you haven’t, I highly suggest you do), you know that this new series has not just the Greek aspects of the gods, but also the Roman. In this book though, almost the entire book is based off of the Roman forms of the gods.

In The Lost Hero, it is revealed to us in the end of the book that while Jason is having adventures in Camp Half-Blood, Percy is having an adventure of his own, based around a camp that the kids of Roman gods train – Camp Jupiter. In this book you also learn the reason that the two camps are kept apart.

At the beginning of this book, Percy Jackson doesn’t remember anything except his name. He has been getting chased by gorgons (evil monster women that can fly). He comes upon an old hippie lady who leads him to Camp Jupiter and who also ends up being Juno (Hera), the queen of gods. At Camp Jupiter, he is immediately looked upon like an outsider. There is more than one person at the camp that knows who he really is, but Percy will have to find out who he really is on his own. He is soon on a quest for the camp, with his two newly found friends Frank and Hazel. Frank is a descendent from Chinese ancestry, and he holds a heavy burden that has his life on the line. Hazel has a dark past and has a dark secret to along with it.

These three friends go on an amazing, action-packed, and sometimes frightening journey that leads them from California to Alaska, the land beyond gods. This quest isn’t an ordinary one; they must release Thanatos, the god of death, from imprisonment and make it back to Camp Jupiter before the huge army that Gaea has sent arrives at the camp and destroys everything.

This is probably one of the better books written by Rick Riordan that I’ve read. One thing that really stood out to me was the way he created the characters of this book. Every character had a unique personality, especially the three main characters. You can easily tell their likes and dislikes, and it seems to me that every character has their own slang they use, based on their backgrounds. It is these little things that Riordan does that really make his characters come alive. In this book, like the last one, it was written in third person. It took turns alternating between the three main protagonists, giving an interesting spin on things. As a reader, you would often know things about them that the other characters did not know.

This book is very well written and Riordan did a great job writing a follow-up for an awesome book like The Lost Hero. As I mentioned above, this is a great book and worth the 544 page read. If you don’t know much about Greek or Roman mythology, I definitely suggest you do a little bit of background research, so you can understand and recognize the various myths throughout the book. But even if you know nothing about mythology, Riordan is a great story teller and will keep any reader entertained. This book is a great read and I give it an A+!