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3.5/5
Non-Fiction
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Reread in light of the PJOTV release.
Rating: 4/5
Pages: 320
Started: 9 January 2024
Finished: 12 January 2024
Summary:
Camp Half-Blood is dying. As Annabeth rescues Percy from a gang of dodgeball-throwing giants and takes him and his school friend Tyson back to camp, and Percy's nightmares about Grover trapped and fearing for his life continue, Percy begins to realize that another quest is vital. Yet Camp Half-Blood's new director Tantalus refuses to grant them one, so Percy must choose: play it safe and stay at camp, or venture out without help or approval to save his friend and his home.
Thoughts:
This book feels a lot shorter than the others in the series; there are fewer small monster challenges and unexpected gods encounters. But the encounters that do happen are quite cool--Circe's island especially was fascinating, with Percy being forced to face his own insecurities. Percy's cleverness, and Annabeth and Grovers', was very fun to read in the final scenes with the cyclops as well.
One of the defining elements of this book is Percy's relationship to anger, especially in comparison to Luke's. Percy uses Luke's blind anger against him (another example of Percy's cleverness, take that PJOTV) so that he can escape. By contrast, Percy uses his own anger as a tool to increase his power to fight the cyclops. Compared to Luke's, his anger is productive and out of love for his friends, and thus is helpful rather than detrimental. Interestingly, Percy later mentions that his mom rarely gets angry and can never stay angry for long, which suggests that Percy gets his anger from his father (god of the wild sea and of earthquakes, a powerful and productive anger) which is fascinating, especially in light of Percy's fear that his anger mirrors Gabe's and Luke's.
Percy's character arc in this book is also very clear: the development of his hamartia (care for his friends) from a proclivity to a complete character trait. This is seen most concisely through his relationship to Tyson. At the start of the book he makes sure Tyson gets into camp and feels bad when he's shunned, but also is embarrassed about the cyclops and his behavior. When he thinks Tyson died in the boat explosion, he feels horrible about his previous lack of care, and then at the end of the book he makes his care Tyson proudly clear. By the end of this book, Percy's unequivocal love for his friends is fully established in a way it was not at the beginning, which becomes even more vital to his character later.
I am enjoying re-reading this story so much; simultaneously watching and discussing the show is giving me so many thoughts on characterization and this lovely early 2000s series that means so much to so many people. I'm very excited to continue with my re-read.