Amber (The Literary Phoenix)
Written on Mar 18, 2018
Covers like Olympian Challenger draw me in. It's a guilty pleasure - I see a brunette on a cover in a pretty dress and magical lightning and think to myself - yes, I would like to be her. And I request a galley. Sometimes it works out, usually is doesn't Olympian Challenger is somewhere in the middle.
It's the story of a girl with a mother who is suffering what appears to be early onset dementia. Her mother has good days sometimes, but the bad days are quickly beginning to outweigh them. Then, a strange phenomenon occurs: every teen in NYC gets a mysterious invitation. Most people can't read it, but Hope Diaz can. She dives into a lake to rescue someone, then ends up on Mount Olympus. Ugh, bad timing. She needs to get back to her mother and now she has to compete to be a hero of Olympus. No thanks!
The story goes on through a series of challenges, and Hope struggles between not caring about them and learning that it would be better for her to win... but then still not wanting to win. In many points, this story felt reminiscent of Percy Jackson - from the parallels with the Greek Gods and divine lineage to the desperate need to protect their mothers. Fans of Percy Jackson may like this book... or they may get annoyed by the obvious similarities.
Where Astrid Arditi impressed me most was in her research. She knows her Greek mythology very well. Not just the gods, but also minor deities, heroes, myths, and contributing players. She did not create a single figure on Olympus - they're all from mythology, and they are true to form. You can clearly see Astrid's passion in the topic and how important it was to her in writing this book to fact-check and share the stories of so many different figures. In that way, this book was really neat and I would have been head over heels for it as a twelve-year-old seeking out more information on Greek mythology.
Unfortunately, where Olympian Challenger falls short is in its storytelling. There is a lot going on and the motivations for both the contenders and the gods are fairly weak. There is no motivation at all for the heroes training the contenders. We get the barest glimpse of characterization even in our main trio (aha, another similarity to Percy Jackson!). I think that Astrid wanted to tell so many micro-stories with the heroes that she sacrificed the depth of the characters and world-building outside the mythology... and really rushed the writing. And that's such a bummer because at it's core, this novel has so much potential.
Aside from the cheesy moments, I genuinely enjoyed this one. I just wish it had been a bit better, you know? I wish I was able to connect better with the characters and that, as a reader, I had more time in each of the challenges. There's a lot of potential here for an amazing story, and it falls short.