The camp store loaned me one hundred dollars in mortal money and twenty golden drachmas.

Huh, apparently dollar bills are alive and can die.  Learn something new every day.

Chiron said the coins might come in handy for non-mortal transactions—whatever that meant.

Yeah, I’m with Percy.

I know what they’re trying to say.  This is stuff used by mortals, or transactions with mortals.  But…words mean things.  And whatever they may be trying to say, what they’re actually saying is that money and transactions have the quality of mortality, which makes no sense.  Why can’t you just say that Percy was given 100 dollars and leave it at that, since ‘dramchas’ makes it clear that the gods have a different currency?

So they get all this cool stuff like gold coins and magic hats and flying shoes, but no one thinks to give Percy more than one extra pair of clean underwear, for whatever reason.  But Percy can’t use the flying shoes Luke gave him, for the same reason he couldn’t take a plane to LA, so he gives them to Grover.

Before I could follow, Chiron caught my arm. “I should have trained you better, Percy,” he said. “If only I had more time. Hercules, Jason—they all got more training.”

Perhaps if you’d…I don’t know, actually trained him, then, instead of teaching a Latin class that consisted of very little Latin?  We still don’t know why he had to be kept in the dark.  Or rather, we don’t know why him knowing his heritage would have attracted monsters, which amounts to the same thing.

Then Percy gets his Riptide sword.

It’s deadly to monsters, to any creature from the Underworld,

Is there a missing ‘and’ in that statement, or is Chiron implying that all monsters come from the Underworld?

But the blade will pass through mortals like an illusion. They simply are not important enough for the blade to kill.

….

……….

I just…what?  I don’t even.  Really?

You know, I had this same issue in Harry Potter.  If you want to say that mortals/muggles are unaware of all these cool happenings, fine.  If you want to say that they should be kept in the dark, okay.  There’s lots of reasons for those two things.  Even saying, as they started to here before veering off into insults, that mortals should be protected, cool.  But saying that 7 billion people are beneath notice and unworthy of due consideration just because they don’t have magic?

I guess if Percy faces off against someone holding a rifle, their just plain unthreatening because they don’t have sharp teeth and claws like Mrs. Dodds.

And I should warn you: as a demigod, you can be killed by either celestial or normal weapons. You are twice as vulnerable.”

See?  Percy can be killed by a dude with a gun, but Percy can’t kill him back, because said dude is ‘unimportant.’

I’m not going to give that up.  Mostly because I (and every person reading this book) am mortal and thus just got insulted.

Remarkable, really, the lengths to which humans will go to fit things into their version of reality.”

I see this all the time in books like this, too, and I just don’t buy it.  I mean, if nothing else, just go google ‘conspiracy theory.’  Not only are humans extremely curious, but we’re also prone to just straight-up inventing bullshit.

The whole reason we don’t believe in magic and ghosts right now is not because we’re blind to them, but because we’ve tried to prove they exist and can’t.

(Chiron said cell phones were traceable by monsters; if we used one, it would be worse than sending up a flare.)

…what?

This doesn’t seem to really fit into the rest of the mythology, especially the whole ‘mix of magical and mortal’ tone that the book tries to create.  Clearly he wants an excuse for why cell phones can’t be used to fix the plot, but why not just say that the wards around Camp don’t allow for cell signals, thus there’s no one to call even if they had a phone?

How would the monsters even know which phone was his?  Do  they just have a tap on every cell phone ever?

Percy spontaneously asks about the time before the gods, and if the gods can die, and what would happen if they did.  Chiron says that the time of the Titans was terrible, and if the gods fell from power all would descend into chaos like before.  Um…why?  It makes sense that if the Titans came back to power it would revert to that kind of bad, but just replacing the gods?  Who’s to say they can’t be replaced with something better?  The Titans certainly were.  Progress!  It turns out it’s a good thing.

A creature from camp drives them into Manhattan to the bus terminal.  It’s near his old apartment, so Percy muses a bit about Gabe and his mom.  Grover tells him that his mom married Gabe because Gabe is so ‘smelly’ that it covered up Percy’s aura.  So…how does that work with Percy away at boarding school nine months out of the year?

They waste time for a while and then finally get on the bus. Once there, Grover smells something that makes him antsy.  Turns out it’s the three Furies, dressed up as old ladies.  They sit in the front of the bus, so that no one can get off, and the kids discover there’s no back exit from the bus and the windows don’t open.  …apparently because this all takes place in a world where safety laws don’t exist.  Apparently they went the way of liability lawsuits.

Annabeth decides that Percy should take her hat and try to escape, because clearly the Furies are after him and there’s a chance they won’t notice the other two.  Percy gets to the front of the bus, but the other two don’t go overlooked as hoped.

What I did next was so impulsive and dangerous I should’ve been named ADHD poster child of the year.

Why does the book keep using this term without having a clue what it actually means?  Same thing for dyslexia.  I understand that he’s been diagnosed with these things because no one could diagnose him with Greek Brain, but once the truth is learned, then call it what it is.  And perhaps also make it clear that the original assumption didn’t actually fit, it was just the closest option.  But saying that god-powers and ADHD present exactly the same way, close enough to even be called the same thing, is just confusing and insulting.

So Percy decides to grab the wheel from the bus driver and send the bus careening around.

people and monsters tossed around the bus, cars plowed aside like bowling pins.

Percy Jackson!  Great hero of the ages!  …murderer of innocent motorists?

Sfter the bus crashes around into god knows how many people and then careens off the road, all the other passengers rush of the bus.  No word on whether or not any of them were injured, despite the fact that they were ‘tossed around’ during that stunt.  Also no word on all the cars that got bashed about on the highway.  Apparently they’re ‘not important enough.’

So, down to just the monsters and the good guys.  Percy takes the hat off and they all have a big brawl in the middle of the aisle.  Percy vaporizes two of them with his sword, while another gets tied up with her own weapon and then starts spouting ominous threats about how they’re all going to die.  Suddenly it starts to thunder and rain really hard, and they get out of the bus just before lightning hits it.

So…the whole point of not flying to LA was because Zeus could knock the plane out of the sky.  But apparently Zeus can basically kill Percy any time he happens to notice him.