Review by ib31 - Die Abenteuer des Apollo 4: Die Gruft des Tyrannen

ib31 's review for:

Die Abenteuer des Apollo 4: Die Gruft des Tyrannen by Rick Riordan

5.0

adventurous dark emotional funny mysterious sad tense medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

First of all, I have to say, the book was simply great again. It had all the emotions, it was, funny and sad. I thought it was really good, but the pacing was perfect for me and the writing style is, as always, good and fluid. Apollo as a character continues to grow, including in his abilities now at the end, and I'm excited to see how it all plays out in the last part, whether he manages to become a god, or rather how he remembers his journey. In this book, he realizes particularly often that he was perhaps a bad person as a god and I thought it was really cool that we were back with characters from the Heroes of Olympus series. Reyna, Frank and Hazel but also side characters like Dakota and Don. At the same time, I'm happy that we're finally getting to the last book. On the other hand, I'm also worried about what is about to happen because this series definitely has no fear of killing characters not even the main characters, and that's why I found the book so hard to read at the beginning, because something really bad happened in the 3 part. I won't spoil anything for anyone here, but I still think that it fits in very well with the whole war situation, and good people do die, or rather, a lot of them. Got Flashback from the final fight in TLO.

I almost had an heart attack when I briefly thought that Frank had died too, but luckily he was still alive at the end. Nevertheless, all the characters like Dakota and everyone else who was mentioned by name were really hard to deal with, and I found it crazy how many people Camp Jupiter simply lost. And I don't even know if they'll be able to recover from that. I liked the concept that Apollo tried to save everyone despite his injuries, which shows that his character continued to grow even when he almost turned into a zombie. My favorite part was that Artemis or rather Diana showed up at the end and saved him, and I really hope that maybe we'll get my siblings again, but it was definitely very sweet. I actually think that Meg and Apollo had less in-depth interaction in this book, which is a bit of a shame, but on the other hand we saw Apollo interacting with a lot of other characters, which was so important for his character development. And I'm glad that two of the emperors are finally dead. Only one more. The funeral of Jason was really great even though it broke my heart and when Thalia came at the end, I thought she would be angrier when she found out that Jason was dead, but she actually handled it well. We didn’t get her live reaction, that's maybe why, but I'm not ready to see how Percy and Annabeth react to it, and also Nico. The only thing I would criticize is maybe that at the end Reyna gives up her position as Praetor and then joins the huntress, because somehow I have the feeling that the female characters, who are not in a romantic relationship, always end up with them. She realized she is her own person, which she can certainly be. But she doesn't have to join the huntress for that. I think she could have maybe just gone outside of camp, so I'm not entirely sure how I feel about it!

Content Warnings