Review: Wildcard

Wildcard by Marie Lu
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

PINECONE GENERAL'S WARNING: This book is not to be read, listened to, or otherwise consumed if you have a heart condition, are pregnant, or have recently downed a Triple Mocha Frappuccino. Literary cardiac arrest may ensue.

Yes, I had to bring back my earlier warning for Warcross, but now with the extra Frappuccino caveat because this time, it took a hell of a lot more caffeine to blaze through this book. Last year, I drank an espresso con panna e due zuccheri and was able to read all of Warcross in two hours. Today, after I got the ARC of Wildcard at work, I immediately got that Triple Mocha to power myself to read the book with all the Frappuccino Fury. And it helped me set a new speed record - this book, I read in one hour. And it was every bit as action-packed and surprising as its predecessor.

Twice now, Marie Lu's won Pinecone Awards on my end-of-the-year blog posts - #1 for The Rose Society and #2 for Warcross (and there would've been more, but then my blog only started in 2015, so...) For sure, Wildcard earns itself a Pinecone too, of that I'm sure. Which place it'll get in the Top 5, I still can't say for sure. But what I can tell you is that it's the only other new book I've read this year that meets the out-of-this-world standard set a few months ago by Children of Blood and Bone.

I won't go too deep into the plot because there are significant Warcross spoilers just from the very start. I will tell you, though, that as much as Warcross changed the game like never before with its ending, it's nowhere near that simple. The plot of this book could've progressed on a total paint-by-numbers path, but Marie Lu's too smart for that. The twists simply never stop coming, the action never stops, and the romance, so Reylo-esque to my Reylo-loving eye, is rich and complex just like the coffee that's traditionally powered my speed-reads for these books. And of course, Lu continues to bless us with one of the most inclusive casts of characters you'll ever see. All the racial diversity from Warcross is still there, and of course considerable queer rep - enby readers take note, one side character who gets their moment in the spotlight uses they/them pronouns, which is always great to see since that's still so rare that I know of. *gently nudges this up to Mason Deaver if they haven't read this yet* Best of all, while I totally expected this book to end on somewhat of a downer note - it does take place pre-Legend, after all - the ending of this book throws out strongly hopeful themes that are absolutely refreshing in this day and age, especially when there are so many people who would stamp on said hope just to have something to keep on fighting against.

And on a smaller but more personally cool note, the only thing that made me pause in my read was the mention of a Phoenix Rider named Jackie Nguyen, for which I had to send my work buddy of the same name a quick Snapchat.

In the months since Warcross dropped last year - hell, I think I even started referencing Warcross in my manuscripts before reading the book. I wrote my characters going to the movies with the intention of watching a long-awaited Warcross adaptation - but of course, my own fictional tech-giant villains ruin the ride. Not the first time I've shouted out a Marie Lu book in my own work - The Young Elites hit it big when I first started writing. Incidentally, my own two leads would make a great and convincing Adelina/Enzo couples cosplay. Those same two, though...they actually get an opening scene in their own second book that now, it turns out, eerily parallels that of Wildcard on a couple of levels.

(Well, my books might not get published for a good long time. I still have time to make any necessary nips and tucks to mine.)

When Wildcard comes out, if I'm still working my bookstore job by then, I'll be pushing it right alongside Warcross like I've been for the last nine months. I think it might've been my anticipation for reading this book after work that got me to sell no less than TWO Warcrosses in four hours today!

To Warcross and Wildcard, the one exception to my usual wish that duologies either be standalone or trilogies because it's Marie Lu and she's got everything pitch-perfect and spot on point in both books, I now say ave atque vale.

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Review: The Smoke Thieves

The Smoke Thieves by Sally Green
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It's been a couple of years since Sally Green gifted us with a good YA fantasy book - and in that time, I've seen a lot of fellow queer people smash the reputation of Green's first trilogy, especially Half Lost, to smithereens. Me, though, I always did like that book as an #ownvoices bi reader, and I still commend Green to this day for expert-level fanbase trolling. Rick Riordan could never! Lol.

But for this series...not unlike Half Bad, I find that The Smoke Thieves gets off to a bit of a shaky start. Not for exactly the same reasons, though. Here, it's mostly the length that proves pretty daunting - it did take me a while to make my way through this one, certainly longer than average for me. And also the presence of several POVs to raise those inevitable Song of Ice and Fire or Throne of Glass comparisons - some of those POVs being noticeably more highlighted than others, and I feel like my favorite characters are the ones less connected to the overarching plot of in-universe politics and war. I'm especially talking about March (who does feel a little half-baked, I'm sorry to say), Tash (who manages to combine equal parts Arya and Sansa Stark to my eyes), and especially Edyon (thank God we get good gay rep again from Green.) But those politics, to which Catherine and Ambrose are mostly connected, reflect a lot of real-world issues very well. The inevitable dirtiness of nationalism and racism rears its ugly head a lot, and then there's the way people keep stealing and dealing demon smoke - it reads, to me, like fantasy marijuana. Maybe a hint of opium in there too, but I'm gonna go mostly with the weed.

It's a long book, yes, but it all builds up to some pretty nasty cliffhanging of the kind we Sally Green fans have come to expect for the last four years. So for sure, I'll be reading Book 2 whenever it comes out, and hand-selling this one at work as soon as I can.

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Review: Smoke and Iron

Smoke and Iron by Rachel Caine
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In the fourth and penultimate volume of Rachel Caine's Great Library saga, we get things a little shaken up as Caine tries her hand at juggling multiple POVs - previously, Jess had pretty much monopolized the POV for the first three books. But now, after everything and everyone's all broken apart and split up like the cast of a horror movie, Caine's gotta pull a little somethin-somethin out of Rick Riordan's House of Hades playbook, jumping between any of several POV characters every few chapters. It really works, because while the book does still run a little longer than it should, it's very welcome that so many characters are sharing the narrative load and allowing us to get more of an idea of what's going on. And how bloody difficult it's going to be, ending the reign of the Archivist and the corruption infecting the Library and subverting its grand ideals. It all builds up to an ending that's equal parts heartbreaking and hopeful, successfully piquing my interest and making me much less able to wait till next year - or whenever the fifth and final book comes along.

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Review: Bright We Burn

Bright We Burn by Kiersten White
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Well, nobody's perfect. I picked this one up only because my library had extra copies on the Lucky Day shelf - otherwise I had no intention of placing a hold on it or anything, not after I found the first two books to yield such diminishing returns. I can tell you that this final entry in the trilogy is an improvement over Now I Rise. For one thing, it's a shorter book - which is great because the nearly 500-page first two books, especially Now I Rise, both felt super bloated while this one is more streamlined to wrap things up. Though I'm more than a bit disappointed that there's a lot less opposition to Lada, I also feel that that kinda reflects our real-world disappointment in Trump's enablers who let him run roughshod and hide behind a populist veil of virtue when he's really just nakedly manipulative and setting the world on fire just to watch it burn. Which is basically what Lada is, let's face it. But of course we still have Radu, ever the tender-hearted guy who really gets into the thick of things this time around, but still is run by his heart and soul the whole time. As with the first two books, Radu's the main reason why I'm reading. I could think of so many ways I'd write this series instead, if it were mine. Like, it'd be a standalone, and it'd probably have Radu and Mehmet be a canon couple, and Radu would actually be the main character with nothing in Lada's POV whatsoever.

But for now, I bid this trilogy anoshe and hope that, while a lot of Kiersten White books have somewhat disappointed me in the past, her next two books - Elizabeth Frankenstein and, of course, Slayer - impress me a hell of a lot more.

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Review: Fugitive Six

Fugitive Six by Pittacus Lore
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I think this might be the first time I've read a Pittacus Lore book and not been super-duper invested in it. Don't get me wrong, I still really enjoyed Fugitive Six for what it was worth, but it was considerably harder to enjoy at times than previous books in this 'verse. Even more third-person POVs clamor for dominance here, and just like Generation One, it leaves me feeling more than a bit disconnected from the characters compared to the original Lorien Legacies.

But there's one thing for sure about Fugitive Six - we're venturing into some seriously choppy, muddy waters here. The narrative gets super political at times, with jibes at in-universe "Wolf News" and "Jon Leary" as stand-ins for Fox News and Sean Hannity and, building on the previous book especially, a most welcome disdain for conservatives - look no further than Caleb's asshole brothers, who hit him with the homophobic insults and mock the concept of trigger warnings for good measure. They're bloody cartoons, but then again, one thing I've learned from writer Twitter is that the current crop of right-wingers is too one-dimensional and transparent for self-respecting writers to write. (Incidentally, I totally headcanon Caleb as bi. Just sayin'.)

What's really the selling point of this book is how much it turns things very morally grey compared to previous novels. Everyone's going behind everyone's backs, and there's not a lot of distinction between the good and bad guys sometimes. (Though there's one returning unfavorite who's pretty much the absolute worst, even more so than ever.) And by the end of this one...well, I won't spoil it, but it gets pretty Aveyardian, that cliffhanger. Not like the original Aveyardian cliffhanger of Glass Sword, but more like King's Cage in that you'll be begging the book, "Nooooooooooooooo..."

All I will say is this: I hope that Book 3 comes out by this time next year like scheduled.

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Review: We Sold Our Souls

We Sold Our Souls by Grady Hendrix
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

My people at the Stanford Bookstore, when we got our latest shipment of ARCs, thought this one would be tailor-made for me. After all, I liked My Best Friend's Exorcism, certainly well enough to try and hand-sell it a lot of the time, right? Well, this latest from Mr. Hendrix deviates a bit from the culture of the 80s and moves into a culture I'm far less well-versed in: metal. Perhaps not being the metalhead I know a lot of my friends to often be - cough KODA cough - I was often struggling to really grok the significance of a lot of the references herein, and just in general having trouble connecting to the characters for the most part. And for being all about the selling of souls and demonic shit, none of that really popped for me - I just felt that it was a little too much about the demon in us all, that it felt a little too metaphorical. Not like MBFE where it was pretty unambigously not a metaphor. Then again, after a while, I did kinda zone out on this one. But that said, though, it delivered pretty well on absolute grodiness - often to a degree more appropriate for punk than metal, methinks, with our protagonist Kris having to watch a hotel guest wander into her lobby naked and piss all over the floor just 'cause. So I'm not going to write this book off, but I'm certainly going to hope that it's the worst Hendrix book I read. (Bear in mind this is only the second one I have.)

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Review: Legendary

Legendary by Stephanie Garber
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The first book in this series was a little hype-damaged for me, and I'm sorry to say that the hype damage continues in the second part - not the final part, though, not when both books have been as wildly successful as they have. No way is Garber gonna end it here, and she's already promised us one more book, aptly called Finale. This middle entry, though, is on the level of Michael Grant's Hunger or Susan Dennard's Windwitch in terms of noticeable Sophomore Slump.

Garber gives us a book that's about a hundred pages too long - after a while it really wears thin, the whole "Who is Legend?" and "What's his deal with the Fates?" mystique. It would help if the book was a little better developed in terms of world-building - there's a lot that goes too unexplained, especially for the second book of the series. Legend himself gets on my nerves a lot too after a while, because he's just so ridiculously overpowered that it's hard to take him seriously. I'm reminded of Pierce Brown's critique of The Wheel of Time - when you overpower a character so soon, the story gets really boring after a while. (Okay, so Brown was critiquing Robert Jordan's hero, and a giant series that goes on far longer than the Caraval trilogy will, but still.) But there's enough of a human side to Legend after all that there's one action he takes near the end that actually, finally, endears him to me.

And then Garber goes and imitates The Cruel Prince at the end, and not for the first time either. I don't know why, but I just feel like too many people are trying to do the Holly Black style these days, and more often than not it just doesn't work. (Like how, for me, it usually doesn't work with Black's own books.)

I'm still giving this book three stars because I enjoyed Tella's POV and her continued super-loving sister dynamic with Scarlett. Those two were this book's real saving graces, just like they were in Caraval. But I seriously hope Garber's building up to a much more impressive book in Finale, otherwise that's the end of me hand-selling Caraval at work.

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Review: The Pharaoh Key

The Pharaoh Key by Douglas Preston
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Two years after Beyond the Ice Limit, here we are again with Gideon Crew, except he's no longer got the backing of Eli Glinn. That ol' Musk knockoff (dating back to before Elon Musk was even a thing) has decided to screw over all his people, Gideon included, by shutting down his company. Luckily, though, Gideon and his old friend Manuel Garza get to go off on one last mission together, based on the findings of one of Glinn's side projects - a possible decryption of the mysterious Phaistos disk.

Because Glinn is no longer bankrolling the adventure, it's decidedly a more minimalist one than previous Gideon Crew stories. Just Gideon and Garza, mostly, as they travel to Egypt and deal with a sinking ferry, corrupt cops, haboobs, thieving expedition guides, the mysterious Imogen, and of course a small Coptic village, isolated from the outside world for so long that they continue to keep to pre-Islamic customs.

It's not the best Preston and Child book of all, but for what it's worth, it's a fairly nice 300-page time sink. Even if it relies a little too much on fakeout "deaths," and ultimately leads up to a string of partial reveals but never reveals all the answers to all the mysteries, because the Crew books are so infamous for lead-on kind of endings that really sting given the longer gap between them than for novels with Agent Pendergast. But at least this one had a more linear, easy to follow plot than Beyond the Ice Limit, and felt like a smaller-scale James Rollins story with the historical background behind the treasure that Gideon, Garza, and Imogen do eventually find.

I just hope P&C intend to follow up on this book sooner rather than later.

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Review: The Legacy Chronicles: Trial by Fire

The Legacy Chronicles: Trial by Fire by Pittacus Lore
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Just like with the Lorien Legacies parent series, so Lorien Legacies Reborn gets itself a series of ebook novella spinoffs, and just in time for the latest entry in the series, Fugitive Six, we finally get the first three novellas in this series bound up in print together for those of us, like me, who don't do ebooks. Man, I'm always super happy that Pittacus Lore can print-publish these stories in such a timely manner. *side eyes Cassie Clare for often taking a year or two to finally put out the Bane Chronicles or Tales from the Shadowhunter Academy compilations* And this little three-story collection does the job pretty well, focusing back on old faves Six and Sam (and a little bit of newcomer Nemo as well) while starting to bridge the gap between Generation One and Fugitive Six. I guess the Legacies Reborn and Legacy Chronicles series are going to be more or less strictly chronological, unlike how the original series' supplementary ebooks went all over the place in the timeline. It's a change I can appreciate from the Pittacus Lore team, though, taking on a bit of different style. Though I'm not happy that Six and Sam are relegated to third-person POV like everyone else in this second phase of the Lorienverse, again, their presence in these stories is a most welcome breath of fresh air. And it helps me get sufficiently super-pumped for Fugitive Six, which I finally picked up from the library today. I'll be sure to read it sometime in the next 2-3 weeks or so!

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Review: Only Human

Only Human by Sylvain Neuvel
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

At last, I reach the end of Sylvain Neuvel's kick-ass, increasingly apocalyptic trilogy, and as expected, Neuvel goes more all out for the finale than ever before. And I didn't think he could possibly top the War of the Worlds-level alien nightmarishness of Waking Gods...oh, but you kid. Well, ten years have passed in-universe since that game-breaking cliffhanger, and now we get to see where Rose and team went. And what happened on Earth in the meantime, where the apocalypse may not be aliens attacking us, but us attacking us.

Cold War II is upon the world as both the US and Russia resurge, colonizing their neighbors, and putting anyone with alien DNA in concentration camps - which also happens to include a lot of people of color, and especially a lot of Muslims, because almost by coincidence the Middle East was where the aliens mostly interbred with humans a long time ago. Like racists need more excuses to be the assholes they really are, but they're just a sign that the human race in general is a bunch of bastards and needs more than just a good kick in the pants to course-correct. Not that the aliens are much better, though. They're often very hard to read from a moral standpoint, but they display so much of a head-in-the-sand attitude towards the ramifications of their centuries of interstellar colonization that it mostly makes them hard to like.

Overall, this book reminds me a bit of N.K. Jemisin's The Stone Sky in its depiction of a world where everything's gone to shit and even the good guys aren't convinced it's worth it to save said world.

But don't worry, it's Neuvel. He won't give us a complete downer ending. Just like he won't go a whole book without loads of Star Wars references.

To the Themis Files, I now say ave atque vale, and of course au revoir.

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Review: Love Scene, Take Two

Love Scene, Take Two by Alex Evansley
My rating: 5 of 5 stars





I was lucky enough to read this book in its original form, Between Takes, on Wattpad. I enjoyed it so much because it read kinda like an old fantasy of mine from my earliest writing days, in which my books got made into a movie with Chloe Bennet as the leading lady, and I got to date her. The difference being that Teddy Sharpe and Bennett Caldwell are more like Dylan O'Brien and Alex Evansley, but that's okay. The point is, even though this style of book is normally very much not for me, Alex's book was completely the opposite, so much up my alley and enormously lovable.



Now, she's got this new version of her book available for all of us to read, and I'll be damned if I don't get them not to stock it at the Stanford Bookstore where I'll make it yet another Staff Pick.



I did notice a few small changes in the road from BT to LS,T2. Like, for instance, the slight de-aging of both Teddy and Bennett. Teddy's now just a couple of months shy of 21 at the start of this book, so he can't just get a bourbon on the rocks when he boards the flight to Charlotte. And Bennett, she's 18 - so this one part where I remember, from the original version of the story, where Bennett muses about how her creative-writing professor criticized her a bit for writing as if Parachutes was already a movie with trailer-ready snappy dialogue. Or something like that. I'm honestly surprised my own creative-writing professors never went there with my own writing, but then again, they never read more than, oh, maybe twenty pages out of the hundreds I've created for my big old series. And they were far less critical than this one classmate who was just the biggest assbutt of them all...but I'm not affected by his nonsense at all.



I also don't remember much of Liz and Will from the original version, but I'm definitely not going to forget them as written here. Will is so much me - he's a queer guy (though gay, not quite like little bi me) surrounded by family who doesn't understand him in the slightest, and I wouldn't be surprised if my own family, were I ever to really be out to them, would out me to anyone and everyone they could just to embarrass me. The way Liz does, among other truly atrocious things that make her the most supremely unlikable character in the whole book. (And I thought Burt Bridges was the actual worst back in Between Takes.) On a lighter note, I actually have a friend named Liz whom I told about her namesake, and she and I agreed, this fictional Liz felt a little more like she got possessed by the spirit of Mihai, the worst neighbor in Bucharest (or so Romanian Duolingo would have us believe in this little running joke.)



But you know what? I'm very, very glad I went and bought myself this book, because I so badly need the lovely chemistry of #Shardwell5Ever in my life. By sheer coincidence, the week when Teddy and Bennett meet for the first time, in my real life, was marked by me trying an OKCupid date for the first time and getting totally stood up because I'm basically cursed to never be loved.



Yeah, Ted.



Mm-hmm. He's got me pegged.

But then there's Teddy and Bennett, who are almost exactly what I want in a relationship. A little insta-lovey, to be sure, and maybe a little too reliant on repetitive lines for laughs (like the "alphabet of hepatitis" bit, but then Bennett also comments on repetition of lines being literally Teddy's job, so there's that.) But the chemistry they have is Stonefield- or Melwood-grade beautiful and natural and I'm always there for that.



But then again, there's a reason why this book gets a fair few references in my own manuscripts, including a recently-written bit in Peppermint where I have Alex Snow mention two clubbers being a Shardwell couples cosplay. Not gonna lie, if I ever do break my relationship curse, get me a girl I can do this couples cosplay with. I'm pretty sure I resemble Dylan...sorry, Teddy enough to pull off that half already, lol.



As for whoever's the lucky lady who gets to be my Bennett, well, all she's gotta do is make me a real sucker for a chick in a ball cap. (Not that I'm not already.) And the part I liked the best was how the Caldwell family was such a friendly and mellow bunch - the kind of family I wish I had. Certainly the kind that would've let me drink a little even while underage (as long as I didn't cut too loose, y'know). Or the kind that would've let me be openly bi in peace - seriously, Will got the wrong branch of this family tree. He deserves to be a Caldwell, sib to Bennett and Tanner both.



I remember Alex was working a bit on a sequel, titled Outtakes at the time, but I'm sure if she writes it now, it'll have a different title. I just hope it comes, though. I'm not sure I can handle a world where this is the only Shardwell tale we get! And though I'm not sure I'll get to publish my own books through SwoonReads, if I do, I know me and mine will be in great company with Alex and hers. (Which reminds me, I need to try and revive my SwoonReads account. It's been dead for quite a while.)



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Review: Exo

Exo by Fonda Lee
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I admit, when I first heard about this book, I had to smile because the author's name, Fonda Lee, so strongly resembles that of a character I created for my own books - Fionna Lee. Enough that I'm going to write in a few references to my own characters picking up this book just because of that name similarity. But I digress. Exo here is a pretty kickass book, loaded with action and thought-provoking sci-fi scenarios reminiscent, very strongly, of the TV series Colony and Falling Skies. I can promise you, this book doesn't end with a single character unscathed, and the reader won't be unscathed either. And if you're like me, you're going to read it all in one sitting. It's that good.

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Ant-Man And The Wasp: Mind. Bent.

***NO SPOILERS FOR ANT-MAN AND THE WASP, BUT SPOILERS FOR PREVIOUS MCU FILMS WILL APPEAR WITHIN. YOU'VE BEEN WARNED.***

The first Ant-Man movie, three years ago, was refreshingly different from most of the rest of the MCU, being centered on the West Coast instead of the East and also, to a degree not shown in any previous MCU movie up to that point besides Guardians of the Galaxy, being very humor-oriented without sacrificing a great deal of heart in the process. It also served as a coda to Phase Two, following up on a game-changing episode in Age of Ultron. Here, the stakes are a little different. Ant-Man and the Wasp isn't a coda to Phase Three - that phase still has a year to go yet! Instead, it builds up to an ending that ties this latest San Francisco side trip back to Infinity War and its legendarily Rick Riordan-grade cliffhanger. But until that point, this movie continues the stylistic and emotional trend of its predecessor, heavy on heart and humor both and also managing to outdo the first Ant-Man in the visual department.

Golder than the gate in the center of the poster, accurately reflecting just how killer fun this movie is.

Review: The Hazel Wood

The Hazel Wood by Melissa Albert
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

It's not often that I get a book that I find severely overhyped, but I'm sorry to say that The Hazel Wood is the latest addition to that list. Promising to be kind of another Alice in Wonderland retelling, it does play out a little like the Splintered trilogy in that it's heavy on the meta-fiction style, stories within stories and dreamy imagery and all that. But unlike Splintered, I couldn't bring myself to care one whit about this Alice. Or any of the other characters in this book, really, save for one - who of course winds up dying, and somehow coming back later, and...and by that point, I found myself skimming through the book because I'd just plain lost interest. This book just wound up trying too hard to imitate Holly Black for me, much to its detriment. Really, that one character who dies was the glue keeping me attached to this story. So I'm going to consider this one a DNF.

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Review: Blackfish City

Blackfish City by Sam J. Miller
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

My first taste of Sam J. Miller's work, and I'm actually really sorry that first taste wasn't The Art of Starving - which I've gone ahead and ordered at the library. But this book? I'm sorry to say it didn't really deliver like I was hoping for. Maybe I should've looked a little closer at the cover and seen the endorsement by Ann Leckie more properly. I didn't like the Imperial Radch trilogy, like, at all, and this book treads some similar stylistic ground - which made this book almost impossible for me to really enjoy. I found myself not caring about any of the characters in the main narrative, with the exception of Soq - they were pretty cool. Everyone else, though? They were either "Ankit who?" or "Fill's a horny piece of crap and I don't like being in his head anymore." Probably the best thing about this book is that it's full of diversity, especially with regards to queerness - especially-especially with Soq, whom, as you'll note above, uses they/them pronouns. And it's got a glitzy cover too. But aside from that, it's just one of those really weird, detached narratives (again, a lot in the style of Ann Leckie) that really just isn't for me, I'm sorry to say.

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Review: The Burning Maze

The Burning Maze by Rick Riordan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The latest in the Trials of Apollo series continues the increased darkness trend started in the second book, while also raising the memorable humor and smartassery back to the levels we've long come to expect from Rick Riordan. I pretty much couldn't remember a single joke from The Dark Prophecy, but here, we get a lot more stuff to make us laugh, usually from the Arrow of Dodona, who for some reason or other keeps shouting in bad Shakespearean every time Apollo tries to ask it for help.

That said, though, that darkness lurks hard on this book, even more so than in The Dark Prophecy. There's some ironic darkness with the main villain in this book, Caligula, whose goal is basically to usurp Apollo as the sun god. And because he can't get his way that easily, he's helping cause so much natural unbalancing in Southern California - even more "California Burnin'" than usual, that's for sure.

What really surprised me in this book was the inclusion of a certain death scene. It's a really unexpected step of maturity on Riordan's part, since he's spent much of his kidlit career actually making sure that a lot of dead characters still get parts to play later. Hell, just look at Magnus Chase - his trilogy's entire premise is built on him dying to start off. But here, there's that one death that's all but final...though of course there's every chance Riordan might still undo it in one of the two books we're still to get in this series.

Naturally, this book ends on a bit of a cliffhanger. Not as nasty as the ones Riordan's been known to deliver before, but more in line with the cliffhangers he's employed in recent years with this series and Magnus Chase, dropping huge hints about which fan fave is due back next.

And one more thing - I thought it was a nice touch of Riordan to include a reference to the mythology of India - specifically, pandai - which I thought was a subtle way of further nudging readers in the direction of Roshani Chokshi's Aru Shah and the End of Time if they hadn't picked it up yet.

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