Title: The Red Pyramid
Author : Rick Riordan
Publisher: Penguin
Price: Rs. 399
The first book of the Kane Chronicles series is The Red Pyramid . Rick Riordan is a very good story teller who pays special attention to detailing. I just loved the way he went about describing every place and the keenness with which he carefully brings alive every character in the story. The Kane Chronicles is about Sadie and Carter who were born with supernatural powers. Dr Julius Kane, their father, brings them together for an experiment in a museum. There he provokes the Egyptian god Set, who traps him in a sarcophagus. The story unfolds with Carter and Sadie, after losing their mother a few years before, dealing with the disappearance of their father.
Back to history
Their long-lost Uncle Amos helps them escape on a magic boat that whisks them to a Brooklyn mansion in seconds. In the story, Carter and Sadie are portrayed as kids who happen to have descended from the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt, which for sure requires a lot of history to make the reader understand the plot. As the story proceeds, the two siblings slowly discover that their lives are far from being ordinary. The final pages are quite exciting as the siblings move from one life-threatening escapade to the next and how they battle evil.
The one problem was the re-telling of a particular incident from both characters' viewpoints and this constantly obstructs the otherwise fast-paced plot.
I also loved the way Rick Riordan built the mythology of Ancient Egypt into this modern tale. But you may require a couple of reads before history and mythology straighten themselves out. But I am really excited and geared up about the next book in the series and I now feel that the scene has been set and the characters well established; we will see more of the Rick Riordan storytelling that we have come to know and love!
Praveen Iyer, Final Year, Information Technology, Rajalakshmi Engineering College
