The Mark of Athena

Rick Riordan does a very good job of taking Greek and Roman mythology and bringing them into the modern world. After all, he has been doing it for 8 books now. And it is starting to feel wrote and mundane.

I have enjoyed the Heroes of Olympus books so far, and found The Mark of Athena to continue to be enjoyable. But Riordan falls prey to the far too common trope of the cliffhanger. One of the aspects I most enjoyed in his Percy Jackson and the Olympians series was that each book resolved. The overarching conflict was always present, and each book moved that forward some. Once each book was over, though, you had a sense of completion, resolution.

With The Mark of Athena, the characters go through some of the same trials they have gone through in the previous books, have a main conflict to resolve, which they do. And then main characters are put into mortal peril and the book just sort of ends. Big cliffhanger. I enjoyed the story, but I suppose it is all starting to feel a little same.