Kay's Bookshelf

At last another book in the series that I can actually like! I started it with a “meh” attitude but I was soon won over by how fast paced everything around Percy was. Now, I do realize that all of the books in the series are just as fast paced as this one, but for some reason (Percy being less annoying?) this one I do like quite a bit. So much so that it is a serious contender for the “favorite book in the series” spot, and that’s saying something because I have really loved book one :)

The recurring characters are just the same as in the previous books. Percy is still Percy (and lucky me, he didn’t have to read many things so I didn’t have to hear about his dyslexia that many times), and I actually spent the whole book liking him (though I wouldn’t have expected it after the previous one). He seems to have matured a bit, and his choices are always the good ones (not necessarily correct, but good, as he is indeed the loyal person one would expect him to be after the previous book), so I ended up liking him just as much as I did at the beginning of the series. Speaking of which, my feelings for Annabeth seem to have reverted to those I had in the very first book too, namely most of the time I cannot stand her. She is clearly the smart girl of the series (Hermione, look out), and I would have expected her to be likable because of that, but she is way too careless with others’ feelings for that.

Nico di Angelo, the brother of Bianca is also back with a vengeance. I imagine him to be about twelve (I may be wrong), but I find him to be quite cool, what with his being always dressed in black and able to summon skeletons and such. A true son of Hades, more so than Percy is Poseidon’s son to me (well, Percy can do interesting things too, summon water out of nowhere, keep himself dry in the middle of a storm and so on, but what Nico can do is way way cooler). Also, there is a new character introduced, a young “mortal” girl named Rachel Elizabeth Dare, who just happens to be my favorite character in this book (her and Calypso). I do wonder what will become of her later on, as I am certain she’s been introduced in the book only as a possible love interest for Percy, because Annabeth is still pining for her traitorous Luke — but we’ll see :)

It probably shows that I had a lot of feelings invested in (almost) all of the characters, right? I did like and did root for most of them indeed, but that doesn’t mean that the characters are all that’s interesting in the book. On the contrary, the author seems to be really good at describing visuals (a thing that for some reason I don’t remember noticing until now), plus his imagination (places, events) leaves nothing to be desired. Oh, and the battle of the Labyrinth is great!

A quote I liked, a thing Poseidon tells Percy, when asked what he thinks about Antaeus sacrificing all sorts of creatures to him:

“Percy, lesser beings do many horrible things in the name of the gods. That does not mean we gods approve. The way our sons and daughters act in our names… well, it usually says more about them than it does about us.”

Thoughts on the ending: It’s a good prelude to book five, I would say. So here Percy is on the roof, when Nico appears all of the sudden and tells him, “Wait, I know how to beat Kronos, and this is the only way you’d stand a chance!”. So Percy invites him in and… ta-daaa! the book ends :)

What I liked most: I very much loved the visuals this book made me imagine: the cherry-colored cattle, the labyrinth, with its various everchanging rooms, the scene with the skeletons who fall apart when they are no longer needed, Kampe, who was half woman and half dragon and “around her waist, where the woman part met the dragon part, her skin bubbled and morphed, occasionally producing the heads of animals—a vicious wolf, a bear, a lion, as if she were wearing a belt of ever-changing creatures“, Briares, who had no less than one hundred arms and “his chest sprouted more arms than I could count, in rows, all around his body. The arms looked like normal arms, but there were so many of them, all tangled together, that his chest looked kind of like a forkful of spaghetti somebody had twirled together” and more. Speaking of Briares, try to imagine this particular scene for example:

“Briares wiped his nose with five or six hands. Several others were fidgeting with little pieces of metal and wood from a broken bed, the way Tyson always played with spare parts. It was amazing to watch. The hands seemed to have a mind of their own. They built a toy boat out of wood, then disassembled it just as fast. Other hands were scratching at the cement floor for no apparent reason. Others were playing rock, paper, scissors. A few others were making ducky and doggie shadow puppets against the wall.”

Isn’t it really cool?

What I liked least: First of all there’s my usual qualm about people substituting “hell” with “Hades” in day-to-day expressions (“all Hades broke loose”, “Hades if I know”) that are so automated I find it hard to believe whoever says them actually thinks of what they mean (so I have trouble imagining Percy thinking something along the lines of “and then, all hell broke loose — oh wait, there’s no hell, just Hades — and then, all Hades broke loose”). Also, I hated the way Annabeth kept calling Miss Dare “mortal”, with disdain, at every chance she got. As far as I noticed half-bloods can very well die too, so they are by no mean immortal and I hated Annabeth feeling so superior over what was actually nothing (yeah, and more than once too).

Recommend it to? I am not sure it shows in the review but I have really loved this book! As such, I dearly recommend it to everyone who has managed to read the previous three books :)

This book is a sequel to:
The Lightning Thief
The Sea of Monsters
The Titan’s Curse


The links to amazon.com and bookdepository.co.uk are affiliate links. If you click one of them and buy something, I receive a small percentage of the purchase price. This being said, rest assured that the few cents I might thus make will never influence what I say or do not say about any book reviewed on the site.

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I cannot help liking Percy less and less with each book. Sure, he is a noble hero, an no one can deny him that (especially after this book when his one weakness is revealed). And yet the author had tried to make him an ordinary boy too, and this side of him annoys me to death. My pet peeve regarding him is that he knows very little mythology (or anyway, a lot less than he should have, being a part of that world). Also, every single time he sees something to read, even a few words, he reminds us he’s dyslexic (but we knew that already! why is he mentioning it again and again?). Last but not least, his one reaction to everything seems to be “whoa!”, and it gets somewhat tiring after a while.

As for the other characters, especially the newly introduced ones (Artemis and her Hunters) they do seem pretty interesting — and, of course, Zoe Nightshade is my favorite of them all. Grover is still the same old Grover, caught in his permanent quest for Pan, Thalia is the same punk/goth kid that for some reason I don’t very much like, Bianca Di Angelo is another promising character and I very much hope we’ll see more of her in the future (the name is kinda meh though, Bianca means “white” in Italian and Angelo means “angel”, so a literal translation would be “the white one of the angel”, which I don’t much care for). On the gods side, we get to know a few new ones, like Apollo/Fred, who is very fond of writing haikus ever since he visited Japan (my favorite one being

“Green grass breaks through snow.
Artemis pleads for my help.
I am so cool.”

). Also, we get to see a new side of Dionysus (even his wife Ariadne makes a cameo appearance), and to be honest I am starting to almost like him, unlike in the previous books.

I really don’t know how I feel about the series at the moment. I very much loved the first book (it was a very pleasant surprise for a mythology buff such as I). The second one has been a bit less enjoyable and surprising, very likely because this time I knew what I was going to find inside and had some pretty high expectations too. With this book I started in quite the opposite way as, after the second book, I had no expectations at all — and yet I managed to end up a bit disappointed. There are still mythological characters (including some new ones), Percy still goes on a quest across America, and yet… and yet something wasn’t there. The book felt pretty normal to me instead of the sparkling one Book 1 was. I will probably read the next book at one time in the future, to find out what happens next, but I cannot help being a bit sad that the first book didn’t get the worthy sequels it would have been nice to have. My subjective opinion, of course.

A quote I liked seeing come to life in my mind:

As he said that, skeletons erupted from the ground. There were twelve of them, one for each tooth the General had planted. They were nothing like Halloween skeletons, or the kind you might see in cheesy movies. These were growing flesh as I watched, turning into men, but men with dull gray skin, yellow eyes, and modern clothes—gray muscle shirts, camo pants, and combat boots. If you didn’t look too closely, you could almost believe they were human, but their flesh was transparent and their bones shimmered underneath, like X-ray images.

What I liked most: A fact that probably everyone else but me knew for ages, but I have only rather recently found out. I read in an interview with Rick Riordan (that unfortunately I can no longer track down) that one of his own kids is dyslexic and has ADD. One evening he wanted a bedtime story and this is how Percy Jackson was born (dyslexic and with ADD so the kid could identify with him better). I think it’s a really cute story, especially as I have somewhat wondered about where these afflictions come from in Percy, as we very rarely get to see heroes “with issues”. The fact that the author has taught Greek myths for a few years is also quite cool (and it very much shows in the pages of the books).

To choose a tidbit from this particular book, my favorite was the moo cow!! Okay, okay, the Ophiotaurus. A cute creature with gentle eyes named Bessie (although it’s actually a he) :)

Also, the moment when Grover got “the message from the Wild” was quite nicely written, making me hope that there will be some more such messages in the next books (or even a cameo of Pan if it is not too much to ask). show spoiler

What I liked least: My nominations are as follows:
Worst Percy Jackson moment:
When he said this:

“I didn’t know exactly when cars were invented, but I figured that was like prehistoric times—back when people watched black-and-white TV and hunted dinosaurs.”

I cannot believe a fourteen year old kid can be that uneducated, and I have a hard time esteeming him if that’s the case.

Worst plot hole:
show spoiler

Something else that bothered me:
Zoe is supposed to be really old and talk in a quaint way as she thinks English is a hard language (changing too much too often). Then why is it that her only “quaintness” is that she uses thee/thou/thy instead of you/your? Not to mention she even has trouble even saying “your” although it is a very simple word compared to some of the rest of the English language (like for example “health”, “depth”, etc).

Recommend it to? Whoever read and liked the first two books, of course. This is a highly successful series (quite similar to Harry Potter in many regards), so I definitely encourage one to read it (despite my pesonal take on it ’cause tastes vary as they say).

See also:
Rick Riordan – the official site
Rick Riordan – the blog

This book is a sequel to:
The Lightning Thief
The Sea of Monsters

This book is followed by:
The Battle of the Labyrinth

The links to amazon.com and bookdepository.co.uk are affiliate links. If you click one of them and buy something, I receive a small percentage of the purchase price. This being said, rest assured that the few cents I might thus make will never influence what I say or do not say about any book reviewed on the site.

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Percy is an okay character, courageous and loyal, and I liked him in this book too (although I have found him a bit too oversentimental when it came to Tyson). Annabeth is a bit more likable now that she got over the first shock of a daughter of Athena having to join forces with a son of Poseidon. She still has her moments though so she’s still not one of my favorite characters, though I couldn’t quite put my finger on the why. As for Tyson, I could see the author wanted to make him child-like, with a child-like innocence too. Only – we’re talking about a guy more or less same age with Percy, who went to school with him for a year, in the corresponding grade, but cannot express himself except in short sentences? Other than that I admit he is a nice guy and all, but I wasn’t very fond of having him around.

It was sort of amusing to discover who the arch villain in the series is: Kronos, who has been torn to small pieces and thrown in the darkest depth of the Underworld, is now planning a comeback:

“He is re-forming,” Luke said. “Little by little, we’re calling his life force out of the pit. With every recruit who pledges our cause, another small piece appears—”

Just like Voldemort in the HP series :) (I expect the similitudes between the series to stop here though, but still I am amazed at how many they are).

It is once again quite a cool thing to get to see mythological creatures in modern times: Tantalus, whose food keeps escaping him, the Graeae, who are now more or less cab drivers, despite having only one eye between the three of them, Hermes, whose caduceus is now a cell phone powered by the two snakes (George and Martha), Circe, still weaving at her loom, running a spa and turning all men to Guinea pigs, and many more. It is also worth mentioning that the Sea of Monsters, a mythical place whose geographical location keeps changing, is now right into the Bermuda Triangle (which sort of explains all the ships and planes gone missing hee hee).

A little thing that had bothered me in this book (and that I vaguely remember bothering me on the first book too) is how Annabeth’s strategies are usually the very same ones other mythological heroes have used before. Which would have been all right with me (after all they’ve been proven to work so why change them) if I didn’t have the feeling that Annabeth is presenting them as her own (or at least Percy thinks so, although he has studied Greek mythology himself so he was supposed to find them familiar if not remember them right away).

What I liked most: I was happy to see the explanation for Percy’s name (as I wondered, when reading the previous book, why was he given the name of a son of Zeus when he isn’t one). My theory was that the author wanted to keep the reader guessing who might Percy’s father be for as long as possible. I like the author’s explanation so much more though :)

That Perseus always won. That’s why my mom had named me after him, even though he was a son of Zeus and I was a son of Poseidon. The original Perseus was one of the only heroes in the Greek myths who got a happy ending.

What I liked least: For some reason I am increasingly bothered by expressions like “oh my gods” and “thank the gods”. I have no idea of the reason, although I do have two theories about it (but none of them seems to actually put the finger on it): firstly, even though gods exist, there still is God, presumably more powerful than all of them, so why ignore His merits? Secondly, I think the original expressions (oh my God / thank God) have sort of lost their literal meaning (I wouldn’t be surprised to see an atheist use any of the two plus I very much doubt people are thinking of God when saying “oh my God”) — so why the need to “update” them, to take them literally, since we usually don’t?

Recommend it? Yes.

This book is a sequel to:
The Lightning Thief

This book is followed by:
The Titan’s Curse
The Battle of the Labyrinth

The links to amazon.com and bookdepository.co.uk are affiliate links. If you click one of them and buy something, I receive a small percentage of the purchase price. This being said, rest assured that the few cents I might thus make will never influence what I say or do not say about any book reviewed on the site.

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I have found Percy to be a believable enough character (in the circumstances), and I did like him and found easy to identify with. I also liked aluminum-eating Grover (and I hope he’ll be mentioned in the next books again, at least in passing). I think Percy’s father was quite believable too in his way of speaking to his son — without faking any misplaced love/affection for him (as it was clear he didn’t have much of that to begin with else he would have visited his son more often, at the very least), but still proud of him and his achievement. As for Percy’s mother, she was one of my favorite characters, with her blue food and her simply being good (I have loved her idea of saving herself very much too although if we are honest she didn’t actually save herself as she used her son’s trophy — Medusa’s head — to do it). Annabeth was the only one I didn’t understand or like very much, always grumpy (especially in the beginning) and always insisting that she couldn’t like Percy or work with him very well as her mother Athena and Percy’s father were usually enemies. She warms to Percy after a while and they even became friends but too late for me, the damage was done, so I ended up disliking Annabeth throughout the book.

Ever since first opening the book and seeing the title of the first chapter (“I Accidentally Vaporize My Pre-Algebra Teacher”) I thought it promising and I expected it to be a good book. Even so, it has surpassed my expectations quite a bit, with all the plot twists and turns and new interpretations of old myths. For example I have quite liked the idea of how gods came to live in America, following the “Western civilization”, as they have done throughout the years, ever since Greece (“Wherever the flame was brightest, the gods were there“). Also, I loved the new Mount Olympus — a severed mountain top hanging over New York (on top of the Empire State building, no less, reachable by asking the elevator to take you on the 600th floor). I have also liked the part about there being gods and God (coexisting), and the way Percy’s sword couldn’t harm mortal humans (“But the blade will pass through mortals like an illusion. They simply are not important enough for the blade to kill.“),and many many more.

A thing I couldn’t quite place though was the casino with endless games. Don’t get me wrong, it was an awesome idea for our heroes to unknowingly waste a few days,but where did it came from? I mean, I’m pretty sure nothing remotely similar was mentioned in the Greek mythology (but I may be wrong). I also wonder how come it wasn’t more crowded, if it had been open since the 70s and people were hardly leaving it — but that’s just nitpicking :)

Now, I’m fairly certain that everyone who has read the book has though about this (and I bet the author is tired to hear it), but really, I cannot help mentioning it: the book made me think of Harry Potter many many times (although a bit in reverse, namely Harry had his adventures during the school year and spent the rest of the time at home; Percy has his adventures during summer vacation and spends the rest living with his mother). We have a boy with magical powers, with two sidekicks, a bookish girl and a geeky guy, all three have to save the world by themselves with little or no help from the outside, we have ordinary mortals (unaware of what is happening around them) to match the Muggles, Chiron the Centaur to match Dumbledore, etc. Which isn’t to say it made the book less enjoyable, I was just amused to notice the similarities. (oh, and speaking of ordinary mortals I have just loved the way they adjusted what they saw to what they thought they should see — best example the swordfight on the beach where people looking saw firearms instead of huge bronze swords).

A quote I liked:

We were standing in a wooden barge. Charon was poling us across a dark, oily river, swirling with bones, dead fish, and other, stranger things — plastic dolls, crushed car­nations, soggy diplomas with gilt edges.
“The River Styx,” Annabeth murmured. “It’s so …”
“Polluted,” Charon said. “For thousands of years, you humans have been throwing in everything as you come across—hopes, dreams, wishes that never came true. Irresponsible waste management, if you ask me.”

What I liked most: Predictably enough, everything related to the gods :D (I used to have a penchant for Greek mythology as a kid, which is why ever since I heard about this book I thought it a must read — and I am happy to say it didn’t disappoint me one bit). I loved the new versions of Medusa (running a cement garden statues shop), Procustes (running a water bed store) and Charon (with a penchant for expensive Italian suits). I even got to find out something new: I didn’t know there was such thing as the Asphodel Fields (and I find it a cool notion I am sorry I have missed until now).

What I liked least: It’s not something that has actually bothered me but it’s a little detail that could have been charming otherwise: the original Perseus‘ father was Zeus, our Percy’s isn’t. It would have been so cool if it would have been a match. As another tiny mismatching detail, we have the scene where baby Percy strangles a snake — a thing that (if I remember correctly) had originally happened to Hercules not Perseus. Now, I know I’m probably the only one who sees/wants/needs a parallel here between Percy and Perseus, but I do think it would have been nice.

Recommend it? Yes, definitely, it’s filled with plot twists and simply captivating :)

This book is followed by:
The Sea of Monsters
The Titan’s Curse
The Battle of the Labyrinth

The links to amazon.com and bookdepository.co.uk are affiliate links. If you click one of them and buy something, I receive a small percentage of the purchase price. This being said, rest assured that the few cents I might thus make will never influence what I say or do not say about any book reviewed on the site.

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