Our hero decides to ditch Grover just as soon as he gets off the bus, so he can run off to his home alone.  But this works for me.  Sure, it’s a crappy thing to do.  Unlike other books we’ve read on this blog, however, this one outright admits that it’s a rude thing to do, and says that Percy was just really freaked out by Grover being freaked out.  So, while Percy’s kind of being a little shitty here, you don’t get the feeling that he’s a shitty person, or that he would do this as a matter of course.  It’s just the normal, human amount of fallibility. 

Aaaand then we get a page of description about his mom.  Yay, infodumps.

When I was young, I nicknamed him Smelly Gabe. I’m sorry, but it’s the truth.

I think you should apologize for not being more creative.  I mean, you couldn’t even dredge up a Gabezilla or something?

Because this is the book of un-subtle, Gabe is also hideous, a layabout, abusive, and takes Percy’s money.  There is not one single positive thing about this guy.  I mean, the fact that he punches Percy and leaches up all the family’s money should be enough for us to hate him, does he also have to follow the “bad = ugly” trope?

Percy goes to his room to feel guilty about ditching Grover until his mom comes home.  LOOK!  A CHARACTER FEELING GUILT AFTER HE DID A BAD THING!  MARVEL AT IT!

Percy and his mom chat and catch up in summary, and then his mom says they’re going to a cabin by the beach for a few days, to celebrate him coming home.  Oh, but not before one more scene with Gabe being an asshole.  Because we need more of that. 

I don’t know, I think it’s the same problem I had with the Dursleys in Harry Potter.  Everything about this character is just so over-the-top that I can’t take it seriously.  Especially since Percy just keeps rolling his eyes and grumbling about it.  It doesn’t feel like someone real.  It’s just a dancing puppet meant to make Percy’s life look tragic, but without imposing any actual hardships that would get in the way of him being a snarky hero who goes off to have adventures. 

That’s all Gabe is to me.  A wind-up toy.  A set-piece.

Watching him lumber back toward the apartment building, I got so mad I did something I can’t explain. As Gabe reached the doorway, I made the hand gesture I’d seen Grover make on the bus, a sort of warding-off-evil gesture

Uh, could you try to explain?  Were you just taken over by a mysterious force and puppet-ed into doing that?  Were you thinking Gabe was evil, so you were warding him off?  Did you figure the gesture was sort of like a variation on the middle finger that maybe your mom wouldn’t yell at you over? 

For that matter, what part can’t you explain?  The part where it magically wound up slamming the door shut, or the part where you gestured at all?

This—along with keeping her maiden name, Jackson, rather than calling herself Mrs. Ugliano

HIS LAST NAME IS UGLIANO AND TE BEST YOU COULD COME UP WITH WAS “SMELLY GABE?”

Percy and his mom settle into the vacation cabin, and yet again, this book does weird things with time.  We can’t seem to quite skip over time, but we sort of…skim over it with these long passages of summarizing.  It makes the narrative flow feel very disjointed. 

They talk about his dad and his schooling, and Sally makes some very obscure comments about sending Percy away to boarding schools for his own good, to get him away from something.

She met my eyes, and a flood of memories came back to me—all the weird, scary things that had ever happened to me, some of which I’d tried to forget.

Uh…does Sally have magic eyes now?

She drops some more hints about Camp Half-Blood, and I’m really starting to get annoyed now.  There’s been a ton of hints and foreshadowing so far, but none of them have been…complete, I guess is the word.  This isn’t set up like a mystery novel, with us trying to piece together the plot from dropped hints.  These are the kinds of comments you leave to let the reader know that something is going on, but they’ll have to wait to find out.  Except there’s been three chapters shoved full of these ‘hints,’ and I’m to the point of going GIVE ME MORE CLUES OR JUST SPIT IT OUT ALREADY.

Or I would be, if I didn’t know all the answers already.

Then Percy has a prophetic dream, because why not.  He wakes up to find Grover has arrived and is pounding on their door, after searching for them all day.  He’s being chased by something.  Sally, obviously in on the masquerade, doesn’t care that Grover now has uncovered goat legs.  Instead she’s rightly scared of the monster chasing them. So she gets everyone in the car so they could run away.