The Sword of Summer by Rick Riordan | Book Review

My name is Magnus Chase. I’m sixteen years old. This is the story of how my life went downhill after I got myself killed.

I’m a big fan of Rick Riordan, I love the majority of his books and they honestly make me so happy while reading them. After finishing The Sword of Summer, I’m a little disappointed. His Greek mythology books are definitely my favorite, I couldn’t even finish the first Egyptian one. However, I did really enjoy the Norse mythology, which I previously knew nothing about. There were times were I was slightly confused, but I’m definitely more educated on the matter now.

Riordan’s books are pretty simple plot wise, the protagonist is given a literal quest and they have to face obstacles to complete the quest. Normally, I’m fine with this and I truly enjoyed the first 2/3 of this book, but I felt like things started to drag on. Magnus had to go through an insane amount of mini-quests and it seemed ridiculous to me, probably two or three of his mini-quests could’ve been cut so they book doesn’t drag.

However, besides the past and me losing interest in parts, I did love this! The characters were great, especially Magnus. He does have quite a sense of humor like Percy but it’s a darker and dryer sense of humor which had me chuckling a lot. Two of his companions are a dwarf and an elf which add a fun twist to the story and explores the mythology even more. Blitzen and Hearthstone are both very unique characters and I’m looking forwards to seeing how they change in the upcoming books (although it’s stated that Hearthstone is deaf, yet he can hear and signs back so wouldn’t he be mute?). Samirah was also such a cool character! She was so complex and had so many different levels to her job/personality and it will be interesting to see how her new job plays out.

I absolutely adores having a Riordan book back in first person with the funny chapter titles again! I loved reading the chapter titles and trying to guess what’s going to happen and then have it click at the end, it was so much fun! Also, I will always love having little bits of Annabeth in my books.

Overall, this was a nice first installment in a new series, although it was slow at moments. Even if you have yet to read any other Riordan’s other books, I still highly recommend this for a fun and relatively quick read which is based off of Norse mythology.

4(1)