Sunday, February 26, 2012
The Son Of Neptune
Recently I have started reading the book The Son Of Neptune by Rick Riordan. This book is the second book of its series, Heroes of Olympus. I have read the first one in its series, The Lost Hero which was a great read, then this one came out a couple of months ago and I just got around to buying it. So far its a great book, except for one thing, every chapter or so, Rick Riordan, switches your point of view to a different character, which he had also done in the previous book as well, and I never grew to fond of it. Now some people might see it as a benefit to see the story from different points of views, but the characters that Rick Riordan skips around to are all in the same group, and he could just as easily fallow one character and have that character be in the mystery of what the other characters are thinking, which would make the reader haft to do more thinking for themselves, and try to figure out what that characters thinking. Rick Riordan had writen a series be for this called Percy Jackson And The Olympians, which is related to this new series. in the old one Rick Riordan wrote in first person which made it that much better.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I disagree. I think Rick Riordan bouncing around from character to character is a useful tool. It helps the reader further understand each character and how they feel about things. It also refines and polishes up on the character development part of the book, which I think wasn't as good in past books. A third thing it does is that it produces much suspense in the book. By narrating the story from a different character's point of view, he is able to hack into that character's thoughts. Usually, the character is bottling up some deep dark secret, and as soon as the character's thoughts start to prod that secret, he leaps into another character's mind. This produces suspense as it spurs on a scorching desire to ascertain what this secret is, but to do that, they have to plow through many pages that are told by a different character. It furnishes the author with an escape route to avoid having to confront what this secret is and divulge the character's secret.
ReplyDeleteI agree with both of you, that he does it too much, but it is a good tool to use. When I have read books that jump around like this one does, secrets are learned and suspense is created, but it is sometimes hard to follow and annoying when it switches every character. Also, contrary to what Gavin said, the writer does sometimes switches out of the group to create a cliffhanger in the group. A compromise to the problem could be to still switch, but less often. This would still have all of the positives of switching every chapter or so, but would give you a little longer to get accustomed to the character, and would give the reader more to try to find out or think about.
ReplyDeletei agree with sam. Getting the different perspectives of the different characters is a good thing to better understand the story, but too much of it is confusing making the story hard to follow and not enjoyable. It has been an interesting concept switching Percy and Jason and putting them in cultures that are similar but completely different. Wiping their memories has been another interesting twist with Jason it worked well because we knew nothing about him, even though i could guess very early on that he was Roman, it was still a mystery. With Percy i don't think it turned out as well because most of us have read the previous series and know all about him. so it was kind of annoying waiting for him to regain his memory, but kind of interesting. Riordan has added some new characters and new perspectives as well. i wonder how it will work in the last book, will we follow just Percy and Jason? All six? what about Anabeth and others?
ReplyDelete