Percy Jackson and the Sea of Monsters Book Review

Percy Jackson and the Sea of Monsters is the second book in the series of Percy Jackson by Rick Riordan. In this book, the protective walls of Camp Half-Blood is weakened after someone poisons the tree of demi-goddess Thalia, leaving the campers vulnerable to monster attacks. The only way to repair the walls is by finding the golden fleece. Can Percy Jackson and his friends find the golden fleece and protect the camp from deadly monsters?

 

I was very impressed with this book. It was a perfect sequel to the first one. The story line and the theme of the entire plot was utter brilliance. The book was fast paced and it did not fail to keep us on the edge. A few new characters were introduced in this book. The quest to find the golden fleece was no  piece of cake. They had to pass through the sea of monsters, aka, the Bermuda Triangle.

Rick Riordan seamlessly makes us believe the already established environment in a completely magical and fantastical way. He has woven the real world and the fantasy world so beautifully in this book. It gives us a better perception of this fantasy world full of monsters. There were new monsters mentioned in this book.

Percy Jackson is no longer the innocent yet sassy teenager that we saw in the first book. He is a lot more confident now and he now begins to understand his importance and heritage. The relationship between Percy and Annabeth begins to intensify in this book. The mixture of intense description, action, comedy and danger is told with great accuracy. This book proves that Rick Riordan is the master of story telling.

 

“Families are messy. Immortal families are eternally messy. Sometimes the best we can do is to remind each other that we’re related for better or for worse…and try to keep the maiming and killing to a minimum.”

-Rick Riordan, Percy Jackson and the Sea of Monsters.

 

If I had to think of cons, then I would say  that the spotlight was always there only on a very few characters. There was no detailed background of any other character from any other cabin. That was the only con that I could think of.

Coming to pros, this book is indeed the key to the fantasy world of demigods and monsters. The depiction of the monsters, the places and the action sequence just got better than the first book, if it is even possible. Rick Riordan took the art of story telling, up a notch. Even though the second book does not have that much action sequence as to the first one, the battles and the fight sequence was written in an even more detailed manner. The prophecies makes the reader want to de-code it and decipher the meaning. So we find ourselves flipping through the pages back and forth to relate the events with the prophecy. The title of each chapter and the first line of each chapter is very intriguing.

 

“We only came close to dying six or seven times, which I thought was pretty good. Once, I lost my grip and found myself dangling by one hand from a ledge fifty feet above the rocky surf. But I found another handhold and kept climbing. A minute later Annabeth hit a slippery patch of moss and her foot slipped. Fortunately, she found something else to put it against. Unfortunately, that something was my face.”

-Rick Riordan, Percy Jackson and the Sea of Monsters.

 

This book received a lot of appreciation from the critics. This book was also well reviewed by teenage audience and Greek mythology became a trend.

 

TITLE: Percy Jackson and the Sea of Monsters

AUTHOR: Rick Riordan

PUBLISHED: 2006

GENRE: Fantasy/Young Adult Fiction