The Sea Of Monsters (Percy Jackson And The Olympians #2), by Rick Riordan

As this is the fourth book by this author that I have read so far, I have to admit that this one is the best of the lot that I have read.  This is the sort of book that is clearly not for everyone, but at the same time it is the sort of book that can serve as enjoyable (if not particularly nutritious) fantasy literature for teens being reared to be rebellious against authority and trusting of their own insight and intuition.  Where this novel succeeds is that it demonstrates the way that Percy Jackson finds reasons to doubt himself and therefore it holds hope for self-examination and improvement that have not managed to show themselves in the series as a whole.  Still, even if Percy Jackson is as rebellious as before, it is not without reason–I would probably be pretty rebellious under the same circumstances myself–and the possibility of genuine insight being found by virtue of the narrator’s opportunities for self-criticism and reflection at least makes it possible that Percy will not always be insufferably self-conceited for the rest of the series, should I choose to torment myself by reading all of the Percy Jackson books.

The plot of this book is not particularly surprising but it is effective in its efficiency of having both of the driving parts of the plot being in the same place at least.  Percy manages to adopt a lonely homeless monster (a small cyclops who ends up being a half-brother) and have some monsters blow up his school, leaving him expelled and in a hurry to get to camp and help save it from other monsters.  His empathic link with Grover the satyr leads him to understand that Grover is in mortal danger of being eaten by a brutal Cyclops, and he leaves camp to save his friend and clear Chiron from suspicion for having allowed Thalia’s oak to be poisoned.  There are some madcap adventures involving a cruise ship that is run by Luke, who is trying to put Kronos back together, a Confederate ship of bone sailors, and the sea of monsters in the Bermuda Triangle.  Eventually, of course, Percy Jackson does his whole rescuing thing and manages to thwart the plans of evil, but in so doing he puts something else in play that leads to concerns about a prophecy involving a demigod that have to be solved in the next novel.

One of the most important aspects of this book that moderates my own generally harsh view of the author and his work is that this particular book shows the importance of being a good father.  Poseidon claims a cyclops as a son and lo and behold that cyclops turns out to be a loyal force for good and a being that would be of help in forging weapons and armor.  Hermes refuses to give up on his son Luke, even as Luke acts for evil, showing Percy the importance of being loyal to one’s family through thick and thin.  This sort of insistent focus on family helps counteract the series’ and the author’s more rebellious focus in general, as it puts that rebellion in the framework of some kind of loyalty and some kind of order.  It is really hard to praise a book by an author like this one, but if any of Riordan’s books are worth praising, this is certainly on the high end of the author’s work as a whole.  This book may not have made a very good movie, but it is certainly a compelling book on its own modest terms.