The wonderful thing about literary fiction is that we start from the premise that everything is possible. The mundane and the mysterious or inconceivable coexist, as a background, in the story that the author’s letters capture in the book.
Rick Riordan is quite well known in the world of fantastic literature, due to his work Percy Jackson, turned into a couple of movies.
Fantasy breaks the barriers of the possible. It exposes you to an adventure with an impossible context in our physical reality. A little bit of escapism exists in the taste for fantasy, but being honest, with the pitiful state of the world we live in I consider it even a healthy way to escape from this shite.
In the red pyramid the premise is quite simple to conceive, quickly revealed in the first chapters; magic exists and is directly related to ancient Egypt (surprise), only that it is not so ancient and its ancient magical traditions (and even people, oops!) still exist and have a personal agenda that will affect the whole world.
The context that history takes is common in fantasy novels; everything happens in our time and society, but in a hidden reality, not perceived by the majority who are ignorant of what is REALLY happening in the world.
Carter and Sadie are siblings, but they live separate lives since their mother died, only meeting once a year at Christmas. Carter, the older brother, travels the world with his father, always investigating with haste and suspicion; Sadie is the younger sister, physically similar to her late mother, living in London with her grandparents in a wonderful house by the river.
This year her father has decided to give them the best Christmas present possible: to break a magick seal that keeps the gods locked up in another dimension.
The way to break that seal is to blow up the Rosetta stone, what happens at that moment is something you should read.
The fact is that the gods are such big and multidimensional beings that they need a human host to work in the 3D/5D human world. The two little brothers turn out to belong to a lineage of millenary pharaohs and to harbor in their psyche Isis and Horus.
It is interesting to learn stories from Egyptian mythology, as well as to observe the dialogues of consciousness that occur in the characters’ minds. As the gods integrate with them their relationship is a power struggle of the mind. The gods are powerful, they have a huge field of action and power, but the experience of the being’s mind is generated by a human personality, and any decent human would try not to be a mere puppet of higher powers! Sadie and Carter are pretty cool, and teenage dramas aside, they are pretty clear about who they are.
I was inspired by the way the gods manifested themselves on the mental plane, to some extent, as it can happens with certain practices.
To access the powers they had to start maturing quickly, meditating and feeling the energy flow to extract the magic and use it to manifest. If a god inhabits your psyche you obviously have extra help.
An interesting approach for a complete work of 3 books, unfortunately I only have the first copy, which came to my hands under controversial circumstances, I will have to wait and see what happens; for the moment the Kane’s story is still open to me.
