Young Writers Society

The Mark of Athena - By Rick Riordan.



Okay, so first off I just wanna mention that I LOVE Rick Riordan's work! However: I am not all fannie about it, I am not your average reader, and I judge a book a bit more . . . stiffly, than most readers do.

So what makes Rick Riordan's work stand out so much to me? Simple: It's pretty much perfect (In my opinion). I try to find problems with it (Even opinionated ones), and I usually just hit a dead end . . . because there's really nothing there that I can find wrong.

So . . . what I'm going to do here is I'm going to prove to you that I love Riordan's work for a REASON! A good reason!

So I'm going to start off with an essential question or two: What makes a book great? And does Rick Riordans writing have this?

First: Well, this is a slightly opinionated subject, but the correct answers are usually pretty similar.

My answer is this: A good book is a book that will give a reader a powerful emotional experience!

Simple, isn't it? A lot of you might think that it's a bit too simple! Isn't there more to a book than this? . . . No, actually, there isn't. At the end of the day, it all boils down to this!

Delivering a powerful emotional punch is everything in a story! Who cares if your writing is cliche, badly edited, and printed on recycled newspapers, if it can keep your reader up till three in the morning, animatedly reading every word of your book, taking in every emotion: feeling what's going on in the story!

(Granted: These other factors DO help, but the point is they are NOT essential!)

What do you want? A perfect book, with no mistakes, that's dead boring, or a great, fast-paced (Imperfect) book that keeps your reader reading! That makes him buy the second book in the series! That makes him go tell his friends to buy a copy!

Readers want action: They want to feel what's going on, and they can best do so through action. They want to feel the emotions! To feel them, there must be conflict! Nobody, by nobody I mean nobody, ever bought a novel because they wanted to 'learn' something! They wanted to get a kick out of it!

And I think that very few of you will argue with me when I say that Rick Riordan's work has a LOT of action in it. He knows exactly how far to twist a plot, keep it believable, and still be able to keep you holding your breath as you skim over the lines, trying to figure out whether or not somebody tries to stick Percy with a marshmallow skewer when he pops up at his own funeral!

Point being he knows how to keep his story active, with lots happening all the time! He knows how to make you want to read on! And most importantly he knows how to make you feel for his characters when they are hurt, or disappointed. . . .

Think about the last book you read, what parts did you really like? By this I mean, what parts had you hopping! What parts made your heart skip a beat? Not what parts were written the best . . .

I don't think I need to even guess the answer, but I will anyway: The parts with all the action, tension, and emotion!


It takes incredible skill to have 7 POV characters, keep the tension and action high, and the plot straight: Without crashing. Riordan has this skill! No arguing about it here, he's pretty darn good at putting everything together! His plot is whole and cohesive, making sense all the way around!

And originality? Whew! Who could have decided that it was time for the ancient Greek and Roman gods to come practically come alive?! NOBODY, will argue with me when I say that Riordans work is original, if it isn't, then so help me I shall jump off a cliff!


So why did I choose the Mark of Athena as one of the best of Riordan's pieces?

Probably because the way he ended this book had me hanging by a thread (Spider thread). I read it, and could NOT put it down! . . . Now granted, The Last Olympian had more action than any of them, and really kept me going as well.

If there was something wrong with The Mark of Athena, it would be the sad fact that he stretched himself a little bit too far this time.

Readers always emphasize best with a character when they know him! And the best way to get them to emphasize with a character is to let the reader 'become' him. . . . I personally thought that Leo, Jason, Hazel and the others were nowhere near as electrifying as good old Percy and Annabeth.

I even had times when I wanted to skip forward to a chapter with Percy or Annabeth as POV character!

Point being he stretched himself too far in my opinion . . . if he'd kept it down a bit he could still have covered everything fairly well (I'm thinking if he just used Jason, Percy, and Annabeth), but have jacked up the emotions a mile!

But even with this! This work is still a masterpiece of the writers craft!


So, I can't really leave this without tossing in a quick synopsis of the story for all ye depraved humans who hath not read it yet:


(The third book starts off right where the second one ends)

Annabeth, Leo, Jason, and Piper (And Hedge) land in the Roman camp just after the battle, and unfortunately Leo is captured by Storm Spirits and forced to attack the Romans using his own ship . . .

End result: Annabeth, Percy, Leo, Piper, Jason, Hazel, Hedge, and Frank run to the Argo II and then retreat from the burning camp full of angry Romans back over to their side of the world (On the way having a quick adventure (Attacked by Romans and a God) though, of course, escaping).

Next job: These 'seven of the prophecy' get all the way to real Rome where two giants are planning the end of the world and the rise of Gaea (They have minimal - yet plentiful - adventures on the way which I shall not mention here).

Big fight, bad guys lose, and everybody rushes away to try to save the 'Mark of Athena', a monster statue, before it falls to Tartarus. However, in saving it, Annabeth and Percy take the drop themselves (Though it turns out all right because someone's got to close the Doors of Death from the Tartarus side to keep Gaea from rising - as well as the Earth side).


It is not a read to be missed!


So, shout out to Rick Riordan and The Mark of Athena: A masterpiece of the writers craft!


~Black~