Hey everyone! How're you all doing today? I'm pretty good. I'm back with another book review because I started reading the second Percy Jackson novel, The Sea of Monsters, yesterday morning and ended up finishing it this morning. There will be some spoilers, so please aware of that as you read this review. So let's dive right in.
The Sea of Monsters reminds me of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, because while The Lightning Thief was a really good start, The Sea of Monsters was a much more complex story with a much faster pace, much like how The Chamber of Secrets was more complex than The Philosopher's Stone was for the Harry Potter series. And I think that's because Riordan is more confident with the characters and is able to do more with the world he's created since the first book was successful and well liked by readers. There's a much faster pace with this book than there was with the previous one simply because, with the exception of a few new ones, the majority of the characters had already been introduced and so you didn't need to do so again here.
Grover is missing for a good portion of the book and is replaced in the trio by Percy's half-brother, a Cyclops named Tyson. I don't really have anything to say about Tyson because, while he does save Percy and Annabeth's lives a few times, he doesn't really have much else going on with him exiting stage left for a good chunk of the book, leaving Percy and Annabeth on their own for much of the story. Which is fine.
Speaking of Percy and Annabeth, there was more of a romantic vibe coming off their interactions in this book than there was in the previous one. In the previous book their relationship went from rivals to friends and there was no real hint that they were interested in each other romantically. I also think it's more on Percy's side than on Annabeth's, because we don't get her thoughts since this series is told completely from Percy's point of view. I realize I'm going to make the second Harry Potter reference in this review, but in that series, it wasn't until the fourth book that romance was introduced for the main characters. But again, here it's not openly stated that either side has a thing for the other person. There were subtle hints in the previous book too, but there's more of them here.
The thing I found interesting about this book is that the quest isn't actually Percy's this time around. It's Clarisse's, a daughter of Ares, the god of war, who we met in the previous book. However, the focus isn't on her. In fact, Clarisse is hardly in the book. But Percy, Annabeth, Tyson, and Grover were still necessary for Clarisse to successfully retrieve the Golden Fleece from Polyphemus.
I found this book to be alot funnier than the previous one. For example near the end of the book when Chiron needs to talk to Percy in private, he suggests to Annabeth that she and Grover go supervise the paintball fight going on between the other Centaurs and Tyson. Here's the piece of dialogue from the book, on page 250:
"Annabeth," Chiron said, "perhaps you and Grover would go supervise Tyson and my cousins before they, ah, teach each other too many bad habits?"
"Sure Chiron," Annabeth said. "Come on, goat boy."
"But I don't like paintball." (Grover said this)
"Yes, you do."
I laughed at this exchange between Annabeth and Grover because it reminds me of a similar scene with Kirk and Spock in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home when they getting a ride from Gillian Taylor (Catherine Hicks). There are instances of humour in this book that I laughed at while reading it.
Also, I'm glad to see that Percy and Annabeth don't fall into traps in this book as often like they kept on doing in the last book. As I mentioned in my review of The Lightning Thief it got pretty tedious constantly reading Percy realizing they'd fallen into another trap. It only happens once in this book, well, twice if you count running into Luke on the cruise ship, the Princess Andromeda. Even still, that's way less than the previous book.
I understand why the chariot races were in this book even though the second one near the end of the book wasn't really necessary. Harry Potter has Qudditch, with two matches in the first book, and The Lightning Thief had the capture the flag game near the beginning of it. But they didn't have that here, so Riordan came up with the two chariot races. Like I said, the second one wasn't really necessary, the book could've ended with just the discovery of Thalia's revival (this is where the spoilers come in) and that could've been it and it wouldn't've changed anything in my opinion. Speaking of Thalia's revival, I want to talk about this because it actually does change the course of the series AND it does something that not very many Fantasy books do.
So, as was mentioned in The Lightning Thief, Thalia is the daughter of Zeus, who was turned into a pine tree by her father, Zeus, during the quest that Luke, Annabeth, and Grover undertook to bring her to Camp Half-Blood when Hades sent some hell hounds after them, due to Hades believing that Thalia was the Chosen One of the Prophecy that Chiron has been talking about for two books now, because this is a middle grade Fantasy series, and as we know from Patrick Ness's The Rest of Us Just Live Here, there's always a Chosen One in these books. But since Thalia was taken out of play seven years before the beginning of the first book, Chiron hoped that Percy would be the Chosen One.
So Thalia became the basis for the defenses surrounding the camp and Luke ended up poisoning the tree at the beginning of the book. Which is why Clarisse, Percy, Annabeth and Tyson went off to retrieve the Golden Fleece, so they could use its power to heal the tree and restore the camp's defenses. However, the Golden Fleece ended up restoring Thalia completely, putting her back into play. Which can make her, as the book says, either Percy's best friend or his worst enemy.
What fascinates me about this ending is that Kronos, who is starting to reform his physical body, manipulated events so that the Heroes would go after the Golden Fleece and use it to restore Thalia to life, which presents one more element for Kronos to try to manipulate to his side, the way he did Luke (spoilers for The Lightning Thief). I'll talk about Kronos more in the next review. I just thought it was cool that there's now two possible Chosen Ones as it's something I don't really see in books like this. Normally there's one Chosen One with the older characters knowing who it is right from the get go.
Overall The Sea of Monsters was an excellent book. I think I enjoyed it just a little bit more than I did The Lightning Thief, which I also enjoyed quite a bit. As I said, I thought this book was funnier and much faster paced than the previous book simply because you weren't having to introduce the main characters anymore. I also found this book to be much deeper than the previous one, which is by no means a bad thing. In fact it's a very good thing because it means that Riordan is at least willing to mature the books along with the readers. I would definitely recommend both The Lightning Thief and The Sea of Monsters if you haven't already read it.
That's going to be it for me for today. I'll be back tomorrow for this week's comic book review. I'm going to be reviewing an issue from the old Gold Key Comics's Star Trek series that's in the Star Trek: The Gold Key Archives Volume 5 hardcover that I have. So until then have a great evening and I'll talk to you later. Take care.
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