Book Review #14: The Lost Hero Graphic Novel by Rick Riordan

Sunday 4 January 2015
Product details:
Publisher: Disney Press
Format: Paperback
Length: 192 pages
Published: 2014
Rating: ☆☆☆☆
Source: Purchased

Jason has a problem. He doesn’t remember anything before waking up on a school bus holding hands with a girl. Apparently she’s his girlfriend Piper, his best friend is a kid named Leo, and they’re all students in the Wilderness School, a boarding school for “bad kids.” What he did to end up here, Jason has no idea—except that everything seems very wrong. Piper has a secret. Her father has been missing for three days, and her vivid nightmares reveal that he’s in terrible danger. Now her boyfriend doesn’t recognise her, and when a freak storm and strange creatures attack during a school field trip, she, Jason, and Leo are whisked away to someplace called Camp Half-Blood. What is going on? Leo has a way with tools. His new cabin at Camp Half-Blood is filled with them. Seriously, the place beats Wilderness School hands down, with its weapons training, monsters, and fine-looking girls. What’s troubling is the curse everyone keeps talking about, and that a camper’s gone missing. Weirdest of all, his bunkmates insist they are all—including Leo—related to a god. 



Obviously being a huge fan of Rick Riordan’s Heroes of Olympus series and already owning the graphic novel adaptations of The Red Pyramid and the first three books in the Percy Jackson and the Olympian series, when I saw that The Lost Hero was being adapted I knew I had to pick it up. So I did, and it is beautiful. So what did I think about it overall? Well…

Obviously adapting a quite chunky book into a shorter graphic novel, there are going to be bits missed out that are prominent in the book. So naturally I expected it to be quite chopped and changed, much like how The Titan’s Curse was adapted. I have to say I wasn’t best pleased with that adaptation, but this one remained quite faithful. Yes not everything was included and it’s hard to really show a great deal of emotion in a graphic novel, but I thought that The Lost Hero did this really well. It kept all of the major prominent scenes that I could remember from the novel and transformed them into a much more vibrant and enjoyable reading experience than I had anticipated going into this.

The illustrations in this book are lovely. Although having more of a cartoony-esque feeling to them (which is obviously going to be prominent in a graphic novel), I thought that each block throughout the novel really captured what was happening in the scene. The imagery was bold and very colourful which is what I really appreciated. Nothing was overlooked when it came to the drawings, and although as mentioned before, perhaps some of the characters were a tad more cartoony than I anticipated, Nate Powell did an excellent job of adapting this. I definitely hope that he continues on with the series. One of the things I loved most about this graphic novel adaptation was that we were exposed to a lot of locations and different environment. Whilst reading the original novel by Rick Riordan I could only imagine what some of the cabin’s looked like inside, what some of the palaces’ looked like and I feel that this was really well done in this graphic novel. I absolutely loved how empty the Zeus cabin was meant to feel whilst the Hephaestus and Aphrodite cabin’s were full of life and colour. Beautiful.

Really there is not much else I can say considering it’s a graphic novel. It’s plain and simple, nothing over the top which is what I appreciate. Will I be continuing on with this graphic novel series should The Son of Neptune get a graphic novel? Yes. Yes I would, happily! I would love to see how Percy’s adventure with Hazel and Frank will develop from Camp Jupiter. As for classification, I give The Lost Hero Graphic Novel a 4 stars. As I mentioned before, not all graphic novels can capture every essence of the original story, but I felt this one did it justice quite well, it was just missing something to make it perfect.


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