Recent Reading: Percy Jackson and the Sea of Monsters

Since the movie adaptation of the first book in the Percy Jackson and the Olympians is opening next Friday, providing an excuse to get the kids out of the house so that the parents can enjoy the Friday night of Singles Awareness Day weekend, I thought I should write up a short review of the second book in the series, Percy Jackson and the Sea of Monsters. The sequel uses a comparatively slower narrative pace, but then the author (Rick Riordan) could afford to place his chess pieces more carefully once the first book had sold well. His conceit about the nature of monsters pays off well in a series format, since there are a limited number of canonical monsters of myth (although far more than most moderns know). Another key conceit, what I would call "indefinite geography", serves as an anchor between the mundane and mythical worlds; the tendency to place wacky magical movies and television series in my own hometown makes this conceit particularly familiar and dear to me. If the world were as this series describes, the placement of the Sea of Monsters is perfectly logical.

One of the joys of reading this series as an adult Classics major is the recognition of story elements, and this installment does not disappoint. The choice of boss monster in this book telegraphs the stratagem of the hero, but a good story is always fun, and the particularly twisted version of La Belle et Le Bête (or perhaps Hercules and the Queen of the Amazons) which serves as the book's mcguffin is amusing on many levels, not all of which would be appropriate to explain to grade school kids.

I do not want to give away the conclusion (it's the second of five books: of course our hero wins the battle), but the way in which the success of the mission of the second book leads into the mission of the third book feels natural, an important feat for the sequel in an incomplete series. If I were teaching middle school, I would use these books quite happily to instill a love of mythology in my students - I come by that love naturally, but I understand many do not.