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The Battle of the Labyrinth Book Review

The Battle of the Labyrinth is a 2008 fantasy novel by Rick Riordan. It is the fourth installment in the Percy Jackson & the Olympians series and one of the best.

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“People are more difficult to work with than machine“

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Percy and his friends Annabeth Chase, Grover Underwood, Rachel Dare and Tyson attempt to stop Luke Castellan and his army from invading Camp Half-Blood through Daedalus’s labyrinth by trying to prevent the Ariadne’s string from falling into his hands. When it comes to the story, this is by far the darkest and most mature book in the series that truly resembles Harry Potter in its shifting mood toward the end of its run. Gone is the extensive humor in favor of more complex emotions and darker elements.

While Riordan’s writing here is better than it was before as he obviously improved on his skills with each new installment, it’s still not great. The pacing is much better as it is more cogent, but we have another issue here where the pacing is constantly very quick, leading to a rushed nature to a story that is longer than previous ones, but still needed more time to breathe.

There is a lot that this novel deals with. The quest-like narrative worked. It was familiar, but still exhilarating and adventurous. My problem here is that there were multiple goals and adventures going on here that the resulting story is one that is overstuffed, though undeniably highly entertaining.

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Percy continues to evolve and grow as a person and he is still an excellent protagonist. Annabeth is also wonderful, but my problem with their romance is that it was rather frustrating. Yes, it was realistic in their falling out and insecurities being present, but the book includes two possible love triangles from both sides, which to me was disappointing and annoying as I detest triangles with a burning passion. Whenever the story focused on those elements, I was annoyed.

And that leads me to my next point – the new characters are not as interesting. Rachel in particular was not necessary for this story while Calypso was basically an extended plot point. Grover got a phenomenal arc with his quest being very meaningful and the environmentalist message there was wonderful to teach children, but again it went concurrently with the main storyline and it wasn’t particularly well connected.

Tyson got sidelined, but Nico was very well handled and how he changed sides was predictable, but still very moving. His relationship with Percy has become the most important in the overall series by now. Quintus was a phenomenal new addition and his story was the most complex and mythological of the bunch. And of course Luke was great and Kronos by now has been superbly built up as the series’ major villain. Hopefully, he doesn’t disappoint in the finale.

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The Battle of the Labyrinth is particularly entertaining in the titular labyrinth scenes. Those sections were thrilling and the best of the bunch. I wanted more of those. The mythological elements were super interesting and better used than before while the descriptions are still only okay. The action in the final stretches was overwhelmingly long and dull, but the rest of the story was very engaging to read.