Young Writers Society

Hey there! I saw this lurking at the back of the Green Room, and, well, I can't resist Percy Jackson fanfiction. So, let's get started! I apologize in advance if I give advice that just doesn't apply because I haven't read the previous parts.

This is a bit of a short chapter, and I feel like the scene ends a little too soon. I feel like it would be better if they just worked through the issue in this chapter, rather than having a chapter break. All you did was introduce the problem in this chapter, but not close enough to the end to have it function as a cliffhanger. This means that it feels like the chapter tells half a "story," which is usually not what you're going for.

Other than that, I didn't see that much to comment on.

Something that I did catch was that I don't understand why it took Leia by surprise that the man knew Annabeth and Percy. I mean, surely she knows that they've gotten around and met lots of people - and wouldn't they have probably told her stories about when they came here in the first book? (Especially since it was the time they were just getting to know each other - parents tend to tell stories like that.) This may not apply, though, because I kind of feel like from the context Annabeth and Percy might be missing or dead or otherwise not in her life.

The other main thing I thought was strange was that the price was five obols. I'm pretty sure that in the books, they used drachmas, and I'm not sure why here it's obols.

And I know this hasn't really been that helpful of a review, but I can't think of much else to say - it flowed well overall, and was quite well-written. So I'll leave it here. Good luck with the rest of it!

Hey, Artemis! As I said in an earlier review, I've only read chapters here and there so let me know if some of the things in these reviews don't apply to the story!

The biggest thing that I noticed when reading over this is that the cast feels a bit too large for the storytelling at hand. It's also something that I had trouble with in Heroes of Olympus. There were so many main characters that it got a bit hard to remember who was where and what was going on with each of them. While they were all important, they all managed to escape my mind when not on scene. The same thing goes for with the main cast of five. Some of them are mentioned all of the time and then the rest are pushed into the background, still there, but mentioned as a surprise. Like they're trying to fit a quota of some kind. Take with this information what you will, but there basically has to be a balance of some kind when writing casts of large characters.

From what I can see here, what makes Leia special is that she's the viewpoint character and speaks for the group. Like the unofficial leader -- spokesperson, almost. With Festus, the most prominent thing about him this chapter is that he seemed to take over as the leader with the ordering. While I might be wrong on that front, that's still how he was portrayed. With Silena, she's quick to violence and named after a traitor, which must sting. However with Bianca and Sammy, they're only mentioned once by name in this entire chapter. Which also must sting, if they ever happened to come across this.

There has to be something else larger with these characters that they interact more, that they have more agency than just one line. If what I'm saying makes any sense.

So I'm aware that I mentioned this last review and it might just be because I'm jumping in and out of chapters without much consistency, but I thought that Charon accepted golden drachmas and not just obols. Reading through his wikipedia page, yes he did take obols from the mouth of the dead person back in ye olde days, it's clear that when Percy and Annabeth came around, he did accept American currency and drachmas. Was there some sort of shift that I didn't catch? I'm a bit confused by the godly economy after all. After all, I'm merely a mortal.

While I do tend to talk about this a lot in my reviews, it would help the story a bit more with a bit more character detail. While the reader does not need to have full fledged descriptions of their face every chapter, it's good to have distinguishing characteristics and noticeable features that are mentioned in order to bind the story and the characters together. (From what I can remember in Harry Potter, his messy hair -- and of course his lightning bolt scar -- were brought up frequently enough that it's what we associated with him. The same with Hermione's love of knowledge and Ron's older siblings. It doesn't always have to be a physical characteristic, it can just be something about the character in order to give them a more varied personality.)

This is also another thing that I think I brought up, but why is Leia ignorant of her parents' adventures? Did they just never tell her? While the memories were horrific, it wouldn't make sense to throw her into the demigod world without a working knowledge about how it went. Percy also sounds like the type of person that would recite the story about his life as a bedtime story to his kid, just so he wouldn't have to read a book, so

I really did like Leia's inner thoughts in this chapter, though! It really did bring out a side to her character that is reminiscent of her father, which is nice to stumble upon when reading. So, I do hope that you'll keep on writing!

~Adrian, Knight of RED