Audiobook Review – The Blood of Olympus (Heroes of Olympus, Book 5) by Rick Riordan (3/5 stars)

Reading Level: Young Adult
Genre: Fantasy
Length: 14 hours and 26 minutes (528 pages)
Publisher: Listening Library
Release Date: October 7, 2014
ASIN: B00NHZ6MYS
Stand Alone or Series: 5th book in the Heroes of Olympus series
Source: Audiobook from Audible.com
Rating: 3/5 stars

This was the final book in the Heroes of Olympus series. I know a lot of people are steadfast fans of this series. While I have enjoyed it, I haven’t liked it as much as the Percy Jackson books.

I listened to this on audiobook and the narrator does a decent job. There are a ton of different voices to narrate for, so it is a challenging book to narrate. The narrator does a pretty good job of making all the characters sound different.

One group of our heroes needs to get the Athena Parthenos to Camp Halfblood. The other need to go east in the Argo II. Everything needs to be fixed before the Feast of Spes, when Gaea plans to sacrifice two demi-Gods and fully awaken. Gaea can’t be allowed to awaken or it will mean the end of the Earth as we know it.

I do enjoy that Riordan is exploring the more obscure mythology of Gaea and the Titans. There is a lot of action and the plot moves at a fairly decent clip.

However there are a lot of problems with this book, and the whole series in general. These books are incredibly formulaic; that is to say they use the same plots over and over again. There’s always a time limit, our heroes always fight increasingly harder enemies that lead to a final battle. This book was no different. It’s kind of like a video game in book format except but not as interesting.

The Gods/Titans/Gaea are always really stupid and make predictable and bad decisions…this never varies from book to book. The action is very slapstick to the point of being just downright silly. I love humor in my books, but most of the fight scenes are just roll your eyes silly. The final battle with Gaea was incredibly anti-climatic too.

Then the characters, holy cow there are just so many of them. I have trouble engaging with any of them because there are just a million of them. Between all the different Giants, Gods, and Demi-Gods it is tough to keep track of it all. This book does focus more on Nico and Reina, so we do hear from them more than the others.

All the above being said, I still did enjoy the conclusion (mostly I enjoy the fact that this series is finally over). Unfortunately there are still a lot of loose ends which lead me to believe that there is yet another spin off series in the works (which I will not be reading).

Overall an okay conclusion to this series. The series is a bit ADD and reads more like a video game than a book at time. There are tons of characters to keep track off and the story is predictable and very similar in plot to every other book in the series. I think middle grade readers who like somewhat silly adventure fantasy books will enjoy this book. I think adults will find the plot too repetitive.

This book goes towards the following reading challenges:
– Series Reading Challenge
– You Read How Many Books? Reading Challenge
– Audio Book Reading Challenge