Daniel Yang

Daniel Yang
The Mark of Athena
Rick Riordan
Fantasy
Just Right
Just Finished 574

1. The ending of this book was probably one of the best endings of a book I have ever read. No wonder this series is my favorite and the author, Rick Riordan, is my favorite. I don't know any other author better suited for writing to kids my age. Many parts of the book were filled with great amounts of humor, even in tough situations. The characters were all well thought out, like in every single one of Riordan's books. The actions that built up to the endings were all amazing. The 7 children of the prophecy; Jason Grace, Percy Jackson, Piper McLean, Annabeth Chase, Leo Valdez, Hazel Levesque, and Frank Zhang were all spread out into three groups. One group consisted of Percy Jackson, Jason Grace, and Piper McLean. The next group consisted of Frank Zhang, Hazel Levesque, and Leo Valdez. The last group was Annabeth by herself, since she had her own separate quest, although her separate quest led to effecting the children's main quest greatly. Her quest had to do with the mark of Athena. After the book told about Annabeth getting into a dire situation with Arachne (a monster who used to be a mortal back in the Greek days who said her weaving was greater than Athena's herself, so she had a weaving contest with Athena and lost. She was punished for boasting that her work was greater than the gods by being turned into a half spider. This is because spiders 'weave'), the book switched stories to Leo, Hazel, and Frank's story. When they got trapped in a room where they were going to face death, the book changed to Percy, Jason, and Piper's story. After they were trapped in poisonous water that which even Percy, the son of the sea god, could not breathe in, the book suddenly explained how all the stories connected to each other starting with Percy's story, then to Leo's story, then to Annabeth's story. It gave me an 'epic' feeling while I read the book and could not put the book down!

2. This book is my favorite book after finishing it and I would give it a 10/10 no question. The characters were all funny, wise, and lucky. Annabeth, for example, tricked Arachne into building her own trap so she could escape. While doing so, she made Arachne make a fool out of herself in such a funny way that I could not help laughing while I was reading it. Another good example is Leo. He always makes jokes, even in dangerous/serious situations, maybe even by accident. He defends himself with jokes when he feels like people are bullying him. Despite the fact that he makes a lot of jokes, he is very good at working with machinery and smart when thinking about how to get out of tough situations. The characters work together to conquer the toughest ordeals in the book and just amazes me every time they do so. This author is definitely my favorite without any doubt after reading this book. Another reason why this author is my favorite is because I feel this way after reading everyone of his books. The plot just comes to life and surprises me all the time.

3. The strongest theme in this book is teamwork. There are countless examples of teamwork in this book. One is when Percy, Jason, and Piper are trapped in an exit-less room that is being filled with poisonous water. They work together to think of happy thoughts so that the cornucopia that they were all pouring their energy and happy thoughts into would shoot out huge amounts of clean and fresh water. This is suppost to cleanse the corrupted nymphs that put them there so they will live a happy life and let the Percy, Jason, and Piper go. A second example is when Percy and Jason are in an arena fighting with two giants, instead of separating from each other and fighting them 1 on 1, they stay together and keep one of the giants on the ground so they can work together to defeat the other one. Not to mention, they cannot actually kill the giants without working together with a god. Bacchus, the Roman god of wine and the Roman version of Dionysus (Greek), helped them out by finishing off the giants since gods or demigods cannot defeat a giant without the other one's help. I have not yet said all of the times that teamwork was shown, since there are just so many. The whole book is based on team work since the 7 demigods were put in a team so they can conquer the quest using teamwork.

4. My favorite character has to be Annabeth. Annabeth hilariously tricked Arachne into building her own trap so that she could take something that belonged to her mom, Athena, and get away. The Mark of Athena is a quest line that no child of Athena has ever, EVER conquered in history. It involves something that was taken from Athena a long time ago. Annabeth is the first child to defeat this quest. She cleverly passed all the trials in order to retrieving what Athena has lost. The first one was to find her way out of a room filled with ghosts that were summoning their leading to kill her with either fire or daggers. She cleverly pretending to be the "mother" of all who knows all. She was very lucky when she cleverly used the engravings in the room to guess their secrets to make herself look like she knows all of their secrets. Once the ghosts were terrified that she knew all their secrets, she caused the room to collapse and then she jumped out of the room, down a hole, and broke her ankle. She used what she could find to construct a makeshift cast for her ankle. Then she had to weave a bridge using some string she found to get over a large opening in the floor before billions of little spiders got her (all of Athena's children are petrified of spiders), and she did it very calmly. After all that, she still tricked Arachne and escaped with a broken ankle and distressed mind. Annabeth is the most clever character I have ever read about in any book.

5. My least favorite character is Hercules. He was suppost to be the great and heroic older brother of Jason since he is also a son of Jupiter, but he had selfish and rude attributes and didn't show any respect to Jason and Piper. He was known as the greatest, most powerful demigod in history but was a big wall in the main quest line since he found out that Hera gave them this quest. Hercules did not like Hera so before letting them pass into the Mediterranean Sea, he gave them a very hard quest. He told Jason and Piper to find Achelous, a river god who had one of his horns cut off by Hercules which became the first cornucopia. This happened since they challenged each other to a fight after wanting to marry the same woman. After Achelous lost, he has been depressed ever since. Jason and Piper were suppost to cut off Achelous's other horn and return it to Hercules. After they completed the quest, Achelous was even more depressed but they promised not to give the horn to Hercules, which they thankfully didn't since it was needed in their main quest line later. I wish Hercules had never been so uncooperative and a bad role model. When the book read that they were about to confront Hercules, I was very excited to see the might of Hercules and his greatness but he just disappointed me.

6. The ending was extremely unexpected. I would have never guessed that what had happened at the end would happen. I was appalled when I read it. Originally, I thought that Annabeth's quest would not be talked about until the next book. I was too focused on reading what was happening at the moment so I didn't make big predictions much, but I made small predictions on what would happen next. Not ones that would be farther into the story, like ones predicting the end. I am very satisfied with how the book ended because the people who were going to open the Doors of Death in Tartarus were finally depicted even though I thought it was going to be decided in the next book, The House of Hades (comes out next fall). But when they fell into Tartarus, it never said how they survived the fall (it didn't say IF they survived the fall or not, either, but that would be the absolute worst way for two of the main characters to die. I know that Riordan wouldn't write something as bad as that). I'm still curious as to how they survived. I'm glad that Nico, a son of hades that was saved by the seven demigods, talked to the other demigods about how he knows that Percy and Annabeth will make it because it made me very excited to read the next book and gave me hope that Percy and Annabeth will survive to open the Doors of Death in Tartarus.