Percy Jackson and the Olympians Hardcover Boxed Set

I tried. I tried really hard. I was really excited for this series but I just.. I made it through the first two books, but I could not get myself to want to keep going about 1/3 into the third book.

To start, the good:
- The concept is AWESOME. A secret world of demi-gods and bad guys that takes place in America, with a sweet secret base? Heck yes.
- The characters are generally likeable and mostly consistent.
- I can imagine that for younger kids, (not the 10-12 that it's aimed at, but the 7-9 crowd), it's a fun read.

and then, the problems:
- There are 12 cabins at Camp Halfblood. In the third book, only two of them are empty and two of them have single occupants. That leaves 8 cabins of kids. Enough to make two teams for capture the flag with several smaller squads on each side. But by the third book, we only know 9 of the campers by name (two of whom are the single occupancy cabins). In comparison, by the third book in Harry Potter, we literally knew DOZENS of Hogwarts students by name, and knew many much more deeply than that. Instead of filling the world with believable but non-essential characters to allow his readers to really feel immersed in the world, Rick Riordan has chosen to only introduce characters if they're important, completely ruining any "OMG IT WAS YOU ALL ALONG" twists that had potential.

- Percy has ZERO facial recognition. Literally, NONE. Because pretty much all of the characters in this book are Gods or related to Gods, there's some STRONG family resemblances. But EVERY TIME a new character is introduced, Percy has to say something like "I felt like I'd seen them before," or "They looked really familiar," or "I felt like I'd seen that nose before," or something equally stupid. Seriously? It gets old. And several times, he doesn't remember people he's already met. I get that a lack of facial recognition is a thing, but in writing, it gets tedious and is not surprising at all.

- The Harpies have bat wings. Just.. what?

- Rick Riordan throws in stupid silly details that have no effect on the plot and make the world less believable than it already is. He literally spent 1 - 3 paragraphs describing how a group of Centaurs from Florida were all wearing t-shirts emblazoned with "Party Ponies" and wearing silly accessories like googly eye glasses, "soda can and straw attachment hats" (because he couldn't say beer hat, clearly), etc. Why couldn't the centaurs just be like.. regular people? Charging in to save the day? Nope, they're magical, thus they have to be ridiculous.

- The plots were... interesting, but neither fresh nor overly exciting. Rick Riordan has an entire new world to play around in, and he's reduced to retellings and cliches. The books that I got through were much less epic feeling than I was expecting. The first one had some good romps, but I felt like he ran out of steam (and ideas) and was dragging himself through the second.

- The guy who reads the audiobook has decided that anyone related to Hermes is going to have a stupid surfer accent, presumably because the first Hermes character we meet is a surfer dude. He also decided that any horse related creature (which can talk to certain characters because of certain God-connections), talk in an achingly irritating horse-whinny accent that literally feels like nails on a chalkboard and was the straw that broke this camels back.