Review – The Hidden Oracle by Rick Riordan

Synopsis:
How do you punish an immortal?

By making him human.

After angering his father Zeus, the god Apollo is cast down from Olympus. Weak and disorientated, he lands in New York City as a regular teenage boy. Now, without his godly powers, the four-thousand-year-old deity must learn to survive in the modern world until he can somehow find a way to regain Zeus’s favour.

But Apollo has many enemies—gods, monsters and mortals who would love to see the former Olympian permanently destroyed. Apollo needs help, and he can think of only one place to go… an enclave of modern demigods known as Camp Half-Blood.

My Review:
5 out of 5 stars

I wasn’t sure what to think when going into this book. My son has read up to the current book in this series, but my husband got halfway through this one and couldn’t read it anymore (Apollo annoyed him that much). When I started the book, I could tell what my husband meant. Apollo grated on my nerves constantly. The story sucked me in though and I had to keep going to see how everything would go down. As much as Apollo annoyed me in the beginning, his love and protection for his children was really heartwarming and won me over. He was going to do whatever it took to save his children and his friend. He grew a lot from the person he was at the beginning of this story. I’m glad I decided to stick with this book. I was super excited to see appearances from some of the Heroes of Olympus characters. One in particular had me squealing. It was nice to get a little bit of an update on all of our favorite characters. I was never into mythology before reading the Percy Jackson series so I have been learning about it as I’ve gone along reading these books. When the villain for this book was revealed, I had no idea who that was so I had to do a little research. Yeah…not good. Apollo has got his work cut out for him, that’s for sure. I’m looking forward to seeing who else this villain is working with. There was some betrayal in this book that shocked me. I wasn’t expecting that at all. I’m interested in seeing how that is going to play out in future books as well. I can’t wait to jump into the next book!