Truly a spellbinding finish to the bestselling Heroes of Olympus series! Rick Riordan flawlessly combines emotion, suspense, description, high stakes, romance, character development, and humor into five hundred unputdownable pages. I truly could not stop reading; each chapter starts off with such a darkly humorous sentence—"Dive-bombing a volcano was not on Reyna’s bucket list," for example—that it's impossible not to get all the way through. The tension just keeps mounting until the ball finally drops and the event we've been waiting for for five novels finally happens. Everything is so ridiculously satisfying, and the aftermath of the main climax point at the end feels so warm with a note of melancholy, truly perfect for this particular series. When I first started HoO, I didn't expect to like all of the seven demigods chosen for the prophecy; if three's a crowd, then seven's a population. But every one of these characters is so multifaceted, with their own fears, strengths, and weaknesses, that it becomes nearly inconceivable not to resonate and empathize with each of them. Even the characters who were not part of the Seven, like Nico and Reyna, captured my heart in this book. Truly a worthwhile read.