Hi fellow campers. I just finished reading the KC trilogy so I wanted to talk about it here since nobody in my social circle has read those books. I was doing an exam for History of the United States (I'm from Argentina and I'm doing a degree in History) and suddenly I felt a whole lot of nostalgia for Rick's books. Yeah my nerd-ass brain does work like that so don't ask. This was the only Riordanverse saga I hadn't read so I decided to give a try.

So this are my general takes on the book (spoilers of course):

-I felt like Carter and Sadie's sibling relationship was the best thing of the trilogy as a whole. As an older sister myself I was very happy that Rick finally made the protagonists of his stories siblings, and made their relationship central to the plot. Specially because most of Rick's protagonists tend to be only childs (not technically I know, but demigods don't really grow up with their half-blood brothers) and I really liked this was the exception because Rick rarely explored siblinghood in such an interesting way.

(Yeah I know that Percy and Tyson have a very important brotherhood in SoM but aside from that book, it isn't really explored).

-I liked Sadie a little bit more than Carter. I get that Sadie gets on people's nerves pretty often because of her sassyness and lack of touch sometimes, but I kinda enjoyed that, it made me like her more. Carter felt pretty mehish to me till the second book in which I started getting a tad more attached to him. Maybe he is too composed for me to love him, and I felt he is the weakest of all of Rick's male 1st person POV protagonists (I'm excluding the boys of HoO of course, but compared to Percy, Magnus and Apollo I felt he was not as funny and not as charismatic).

-I really liked most of the things that happened with Zia's character. I personally would have liked more screentime of her (or booktime, but you get what I mean). Though I admit it would have been really hard to do so and not disjoint the story, but I ended up wanting to know more about her. Her relationship with Carter had some interesting moments and imo was fine, nothing breathtaking, but cool.

-The whole Walt/Anubis debacle... that's a bit rough imo. I honestly feel the reasons why Sadie likes both of them is because they look "hot" and she is hormonal as hell. I would say I prefer Walt since he shows a wider variety of emotions than Anubis, which to me his characterization as an "emo brooding teenage god" felt a bit flat. I honesly would have enjoyed this debacle a bit more if Sadie had more deep reasons to liking both of them aside from them being hot, I felt slowing things down could have helped this. I was spoiled about the fact they join bodies so I wasn't shocked when that happened and that didn't gave a big impression on me. The scene in which Anubis first kisses Sadie has to be the most uncomfortable I ever felt while reading a Rick book, by far. It did bother me a bit that the books acknowledged so much that the age difference between Anubis and Sadie was problematic but still decided to go with it.

-Bes and Bast were great. I loved every single scene they were in.

-I really liked the idea of using obelisks of the world to move around, and I was a bit disappointed that was kinda dropped after the first book (I really liked learing about the Washington Obelisk!). My brain even though about Sadie and Carter appearing at the Obelisco in my city (lmao) but I knew it was foolish to think that would happen. Still, I would have like this resource to be used more. (context: there is an obelisk in my city and it's pretty much the most famous landmark from my country. In case ur curious goolge "Obelisco de Buenos Aires")

-The rest of the secondary characters I didn't mention I really didn't mind much, I think Amos was the one I grew up more attached to.

-Apophis as a villian was ok, I really liked all the sheut shit in the last book, it gave me huge Jungian vibes.

-Maybe I'm getting old or I've read the books of this man so much that I already know what will happen so I've never really felt like the characters were really in danger. That does diminish my excitement a little bit but I guess it's normal that this happens after being into Rick's books for almost 10 years. I personally would have liked a death too, but aside from Desjardins (a death I quite liked how it was done) we got none. Maybe I would have enjoyed this more if I read it at 14/15 but that didn't happen so these are my opinions now.

-My ranking of the books is the following:

Throne of Fire (8)

Serpent's Shadow (7)

Red Pyramid (6/6.5)

I know most ppl tend to consider the 3rd one the best but I enjoyed the 2nd one more. I could elaborate on what I think of each book but this is already pretty long.

-Overall I think this is Rick's weakest trilogy. Of course all the mythologic and historic symbolism is great, but I felt it had less memorable moments than the rest of his works. In general I also felt the sense of humor of these books wasn't as good, the one that made me laugh the most was Throne of Fire (and probably because of Bes, and the Lenin jokes, that shit made me chuckle a lot). I felt like MC works better as a trilogy, as it has more stakes in it and imo it has a cast of characters that works much better than in here. I doubt I will reread this trilogy (though this gave me nostalgia of MC! so I'm considering buying them physically soon) and I really really doubt I'll ever read the Demigods and Magicians trilogy. I'll probably need a very long break from Rick's books to do that, they tend to worn me out despite loving them.

-However I will definitely watch the movies when they come out! I'm glad reading this made me be looking foward to that, and I'm interested in the adaptation.

So those are my thoughts. Feel free to disagree and discuss them.

Fun fact: Reading this made me miss Percabeth (because this always happens to me when I read any Riordanverse book that doesn't feature them) and The Chalice of Gods got announced yesterday, I kinda felt like my prayers were heard lmao.