Carter and Sadie Kane, ages 14 and 12 respectively, do not know each other much at all although they are brother and sister. When they were 8 and 6, their mother got into some sort of accident with their father and she died. Her parents wanted to take both children in, as they blamed Julius for her death, but Julius demanded at least one of his kids and to be able to see the other. So, Sadie lives with her grandparents in London, and Carter travels the world with his father. One Christmas, Carter and Sadie are both with their father for his yearly visitation. However, their father is acting strangely, admits that their mother had died at an Egyptian artifact in London, and takes them to a museum for his work instead of going somewhere normal and Christmas-y. As Carter and Sadie are both very suspicious of their father’s actions, he increases the tension by telling them to lock the curator of the museum in his office so he could access the Rosetta Stone privately. He tells them to stay out of the room, but they sneak in and end up seeing what he was really doing.
He makes the Stone explode, and instead of summoning Osiris he summons Set, the god of Chaos. Set captures their father, some strange people seemingly save Carter and Sadie, and Carter and Sadie are taken into the custody of the police. Never to fear, Amos, the Kanes’ uncle, whisk them away from the police and their grandparents into the world of Egyptian magic, and take them from London to Brooklyn, New York.
It has been a while since I had read this book. The last time I remember it, I was listening to it on audiobook as I went to sleep as something relaxing to do. Needless to say, it wasn’t that relaxing, and I found myself more often than not staying up an extra few minutes to listen to the story. However, by falling asleep listening to the story, I remembered some parts of it as I was re-reading it now, and could read the whole story in everyone’s “voices” just from the memory of it.
I loved this story more than the Percy Jackson series at the time because I was closer to the age of the characters and this gave me a GIANT book to read with characters my own age. Now I am 3 years older than Carter was in this book, and so the little romantic tidbits and bad jokes sometimes seem boring to me now, but I remember reading it when I was 11 and 12 and thinking that it was the best book ever. Now I think of it fondly, but I do see why some people thought it was boring or disliked it.
The story is pretty action packed in some parts, but in order to enjoy the story you have to get through the pages when nothing really happens or they are just exploring a secret room and no one is doing anything. I feel as if this will improve as the story goes on, but I did find it to be dragging a bit in some places. I do not know if there were any historical errors in the story as I do not know much about Egyptian mythology, but I thought that Rick Riordan did a great job of giving each of the Egyptian gods mentioned in the story their own personalities.
One thing I did like in the story was that there were no good for nothing characters. As I am reading the Percy Jackson series, sometimes I just get annoyed with Grover and how he seemed to slow things down more than he seemed to help. However, even though Carter wasn’t the most athletic, and Sadie didn’t know much about the mythology, no one seemed to be the brunt of the joke or the character who slowed everyone else down. Everyone in the story pulled their weight in their own way, and that’s what I loved about it.
Overall, if you haven’t read this book series yet, I advise you to take some time this summer to read it. It is definitely worth your while.
Overall Rating: 4.5/5
[…] be a comedy series, all of the books in the series made me die of laughter at one point or another. Here is a link to my review of the Red Pyramid/The first book in the […]