The Tyrant’s Tomb review
Being disappointed in Uncle Rick is not a fun feeling… The slow pace and lack of urgency in this book (especially after what happened in the previous book) left me with an overall impression of meh – which was only improved to a okay thanks to some stellar past favourite characters and Apollo’s character growth. Book five better be godly…
~💀💥🏹~
The Tyrant’s Tomb
by Rick Riordan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Gave this a generous 3 stars for the badass that is Reyna Avila Ramírez-Arellano, the shapeshifting treasure that is Frank Zhang, and for Apollo finally facing the consequences for some of his many mistakes & learning from them.
I say generous because this book was stupidly long for the amount of actual plot it contained. There was so much filler, the stakes didn’t feel very high, the action wasn’t exciting enough once it finally arrived, and the humor that was so good previously in this series was almost completely missing.
It was a struggle at times to keep reading this book. I didn’t like Lavinia, the new important supporting character for this part of Apollo’s quests. She annoyed me and there wasn’t enough explanation for many of her actions. The mythology is usually fun to learn and delivered in creative ways in Rick’s books, but this time around it felt like Apollo was just like, “So I did a bad thing to this person a long time ago and they still hate me.” The usual exposition was missing, and there was a lot of repetition thanks to the emperors still set on their evil domination. (They were somehow one of the most interesting parts of this book? What happened there…?)
I really hope the series finale picks up the pace and has more of Apollo’s humor added back in. And more mythology woven into the story rather than presented so plainly. And maybe the appearance of a certain Greek demigod. Is that too much to ask?
Rule Number 32 