So, Sally starts driving like a bat out of hell to get away from the…whatever, and Percy is still boggled that Grover has goat legs.  He asks how Grover and his mom know each other, and it’s said that his mom just knew about him, not knew Grover specifically.  So…how come his mom gets to know all this, but Percy doesn’t?  I’m assuming there’s some sort of explanation for all this that I just forgot because it wasn’t important past the first book, but it seems like he’d be a lot better at helping keep himself alive if he knew he was supposed to be trying to stay alive. Even in a meta sense it doesn’t work too well.  He’s been attacked once.  After that, he should have been let in on the deal, in case more attacks happened.  (As, indeed, they are.)  Monster attacks are the point at which the cat is out of the bag.  They are not subtle hints that something odd is going on, like the other stuff has been.  They are MONSTERS THAT ATTACK THE MAIN CHARACTER.  THAT’S KIND OF A BIG DEAL.  It should be something that changes the status-quo, not gets brushed under the rug.

“Um … what are you, exactly?”

 “That doesn’t matter right now.”

You’re in a car.  You’re not using your breath for running or making battle plans.  You’re not telling him anything more important.  Are you just keeping secrets now to fuck with him?

“The less you knew, the fewer monsters you’d attract,” Grover said, like that should be perfectly obvious.

Because…magic?  Because he’d act suspicious if he knew?  Because reasons?

We hoped you’d think the Kindly One was a hallucination.

“We hoped you would think that you were mentally unstable and that your life was even more severely fucked up than you thought, because losing your sanity is a much kinder option than just telling you the truth.  Or coming up with a better lie.”

Seriously, is Percy prone to hallucinations?  Then he should be getting professional care!  If he’s not, then why would anyone think that he’d assume this was a hallucination?

Grover and Sally continue to doll out information in bits and spurts as they drive away from the ‘something’ that’s chasing them, and seriously, it feels like they’re just fucking with him.  They’re not trying to get out the most important stuff first and don’t have time for the rest.  Instead they’re explaining what already happened, like that the ladies with the yarn were the Fates.  Um, not important, tell him about the monster chasing him!  This makes it pretty clear that the main intent of this scene is for the audience, not Percy.

And then everyone stops talking so that Percy can muse for a while about things that have already happened in the book.  They have a limited amount of time to give Percy as much life-saving information as they can, and they’re not saying anything.  Again, structurally, this is all a bit backwards.  BIG EXCITING THINGS are happening, but the book spends large chunks of time going backwards to explain stuff that happened a few chapters ago.  Wait for a quiet moment to do that in, book.

Then their car explodes.

I remember feeling weightless, like I was being crushed, fried, and hosed down all at the same time.

I…don’t understand how the second half of that sentence connects with the first half.

They see the monster lumbering toward them through the rain, and Sally tells Percy to climb out of the car and make a run for some huge tree off on the horizon, because it’s the marker of the property line.  Percy refuses to leave Sally and Grover.  Yay, good for you, Percy!  Look at you and your un-sociopath self.

Sally and Percy drag Grover out of the car and start carrying him up the hill.  Percy gets a clear view (and thus describes for the reader) the minotaur that’s chasing them.  Sally is extremely well-informed about this beast.  Did she just decide to study-up on mythology when she found out her lover was a god, or have the Powers That Be told her stuff.  Which they didn’t tell Percy.  Because…reasons.  (I know the reason they gave, but they didn’t give a reason for that reason, so it still doesn’t make sense.)  Sally says the minotaur works by scent instead of sight, which begs the question of how the hell it followed them when they were in the car.  Did it sniff out their car?  If it smells well enough to follow their scent even while they were in a vehicle, then it wouldn’t still be at the bottom of the hill, trying to figure out where they are.

The minotaur charges at them, and Sally tells Percy to dive sideways because it can’t change direction.  So he does and it works.  But Sally can’t cross the property line, so she tries to lead the minotaur away.  It caches her, but then she dissolves into light and nothingness.  I want to be scared at this scene, but I’m mostly relieved that Sally’s gone.  Not because she was unpleasant.  She’s a nice character, really.  But the way she and Grover keep dolling out information with a baby spoon just irritates the fuck out of me.  Plus, I know she’s okay, so that helps.

Percy hasn’t read the script, so he’s freaked out, of course.

Percy gets all angry and decides to take off his red jacket and wave it around like a bullfighter while yelling.  Despite what his mother said about it having bad vision and hearing.  Now, he’s freaked out, so of course he’d forget and default to bull-head = bull.  But it works.  So it seems the author forgot that, too.

The bull-man charged too fast, his arms out to grab me whichever way I tried to dodge.

Uh, but Percy already dodged this thing once.  Why can’t he do it again?  Duck under the arms.  Fling yourself at the ground sideways and miss the arms completely.  The point of this thing is that it can’t change its actions very fast, so it won’t be able to bend over and nab you.

Instead, Percy spontaneously develops ninja powers and jumps on the thing’s head.  I guess this is supposed to be his demigod powers showing up, but I’m never impressed by powers that end up being “ninja.”  Especially since he shouldn’t have a handle on them at this point.  If he had super-strength or super-jumping and, say, accidently got stuck in the top of the tree, or could hit really hard but mostly flailed around because strength =/= skill, that would be one thing.  But…yeah, this is just insta-ninja.

He rides around on the thing’s shoulders while it tries to buck him off, then pulls off one of its horns.  He uses the horn to stab the minotaur, which ends up killing it.  Or disintegrating it, I can’t remember if those are the same in this mythology or not.

Percy, all injured from his fight, stumbles over to Grover and passes out right as two new people show up.

And…except for the ninja part and the weird insistence on not telling Percy anything, the fight scene was really pretty good.  Exciting, well, paced, and also YES, STUFF IS FUCKING HAPPENING, ABOUT TIME.  It’s strange, because we’re still very near the front of the book.  This is about the right time for stuff to really gain some traction.  I think in this book, it just feels like it’s been longer because the build-up was such a tease.