How do you create an epic adventure? Start with the three Ms: mystery, myth and magic. Then, throw in some heroes with special talents who fight monsters in action-packed sequences to save friends and family. Homer knew how to do it. So did J.K. Rowling.
And so too does veteran junior fiction author Rick Riordan, who has followed up his excellent and mega-successful Percy Jackson series with the equally wonderful The Red Pyramid, the first book in his new franchise The Kane Chronicles.
In the Texan author's first series, demigod Percy Jackson (his dad was sea god Poseidon) found out that the Olympic gods were alive and well in Manhattan. Together with his friends Annabeth, the daughter of Athena, the goddess of wisdom, and Grover, a satyr, Jackson raced to save Olympus - located above the Empire State building - from the evil Titan lord Kronos.
The Red Pyramid features a new set of gods and monsters - Riordan has moved to the even older mythology of Ancient Egypt - and new heroes in the form of brother-sister duo Carter and Sadie Kane. Although Sadie, 12, lives with her grandparents in present-day London and Carter, 15, travels the world with his Egyptologist father, the siblings find out they are descendants of pharaohs and thus have the magical ability to house the spirits of Egyptian gods within them.
Just as in the Jackson series, Riordan has made sure that his dynamic duo - despite their supernatural abilities - share the same real-life problems as many of his readers. Percy, for example, had difficulty in school and suffered from ADHD. The Kane siblings face a different hurdle: their biracial heritage. As Carter explained, "My dad had always drilled it into my head that I had to dress my best. I remember the first time he explained it to me. 'Carter, you're getting older. You're an African-American man. People will judge you more harshly, and so you must always look impeccable.' "
The siblings also lost their mother in an unexplained accident, and Sadie only sees her brother and father twice a year because her grandparents have custody. If that's not enough, within the first few pages of the book, their father blows up the British Museum, releases five Egyptian gods including the dastardly Set, and ends up disappearing through the ground encased in a golden coffin. And so the adventure begins.
Carter and Sadie are taken to Luxor to an ancient Egyptian school for young magicians, where they learn that each of them has an Egyptian god housed within. Horus lives in Carter while Isis resides in Sadie. The two also discover that they can shape-shift, read hieroglyphics and do magic.
Riordan helps the reader keep track of what's going on with each narrator, and with the intricacies of the vast Egyptian pantheon, by structuring the book as a digital recording between the two siblings; half of it is told from Carter's perspective and the other from Sadie's. This often results in hilarious dialogue such as, "A goddess named Nut? Is her last name Case?" Riordan's understanding of what his reader will find funny comes from years as a middle-school teacher, and it's this levity that keeps The Red Pyramid from becoming tediously mired in a barrage of mythological data.
Instead, the reader is enthralled as Carter and Sadie leap from one electrifying moment to another. First they're battling in London, then it's off to Paris to find secret texts, then it's on to Memphis, Tenn., to find the god Thoth. The reader barely has time to draw a breath before you're at the final battle. But since it's only the first book in the series, Riordan has left plenty of room for the next instalment. At the end of The Red Pyramid, Carter and Sadie leave a transcript of the digital recording they made in a school locker in the hopes that others with their type of power will come forward to take up a new story line with new deities.
Judith Pereira is an editor at The Globe and Mail.