Tuesday, September 29, 2015

The Sword of Summer by Rick Riordan - ESSENTIAL

Riordan, Rick The Sword of Summer (Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard), 491 pages.  Disney, 2015.  $20.  Violence (PG-13 - not grossly descriptive, but there is A LOT of it); Mature Content: G; Language: (I’ll get back to you on that - I forgot to count as I was reading).

Magnus Chase has lived on the streets for the last couple of years - expressly to avoid any type of interaction with his creepy Uncle Raymond.  The one day he sees his Uncle Frederick and cousin Annabeth looking for him and decides he’d better find out what is going on.  Instead he gets a weird story from Randolph and ends of dead in what he thinks was a fight with an evil Norse God.  Now he’s dead and in Valhalla, where dead heroes train daily to fight off the end of the world.  What has Magnus gotten into?

Welcome to the rollicking beginning of a new teenaged hero and another set of Gods.  Riordan sure knows how to hook a reader and keep their attention.  And there still isn’t anyone who does it quite as well as he does.   This series feels more mature than his previous works, with an older protagonist and a world created around being dead and fighting all of the time.  I was surprised by the 10-14 age recommendation, because I am not going to recommend this for elementary at all (if you don’t carry The Hunger Games, and elementaries you SHOULD NOT, then you shouldn’t carry this).

MS, HS - ESSENTIAL.  Cindy, Library Teacher

2 comments:

Ms. Yingling said...

Either jealous that you got an ARC of this, or a little panicked that I don't have a copy yet. I was thinking 10/6 and planning on going to the big box grocer to get three copies the day it came out! Good to know that it has more mature content.

Cindy Mitchell said...

I admit it - I was lucky enough to receive an ARC. But now the big day is just around the corner and everyone will get to enjoy soon. I too will be driving to a local bookstore (Love you, Kings English!) to pick up some copies.