In a way, it’s nice to know there are Greek gods out there, because you have somebody to blame when things go wrong. For instance, when you’re walking away from a bus that’s just been attacked by monster hags and blown up by lightning, and it’s raining on top of everything else, most people might think that’s just really bad luck; when you’re a half-blood, you understand that some divine force really is trying to mess up your day.

I’m not sure what it is about this that bugs me, but it does.  Like, is he saying that Zeus didn’t kill him, so he decided to rain on him instead?  That every rainstorm exists just to make someone miserable?  …that exploding buses happen all the time, just no one knew who to blame them on?

So they hurry away from the attack, bickering all the way.

“What did you want me to do? Let you get killed?”

“You didn’t need to protect me, Percy. I would’ve been fine.”

Ever notice that female characters only say this when they very clearly did need rescuing?  It’s like the author wants Strong Female Character credit points, but all he really ends up doing is making the character look stubborn and stupid.  Which is fine as a character trait, but worrying when it becomes a trend.  After enough characters like this, it feels more like people just want the credit for having the girl stand up for herself, but can’t be arsed to make her actually as kickass as the male.

Where’s the girl who says “holy fuck, three Furies all at once, hey give me a hand over here”?  I mean, it’s not like you can’t ask for help without giving up your strong card.

She was silent for a few more steps. “It’s just that if you died … aside from the fact that it would really suck for you, it would mean the quest was over. This may be my only chance to see the real world.”

Yeah, but if you die to don’t get to see anything, either.

So they walk around through the woods for a while and eventually come to the conclusion that Annabeth really does kick ass even if it’s perfectly reasonable she couldn’t beat three Furies on her own, and then they’re buddies again.  Eventually they come across a tiny little road that has a curio shop on it.

She loved reading so much, I’d forgotten she was dyslexic, too.

Seriously, guys, magic brain muckage =/= dyslexia. 

Although, this was explained as their brains being ‘hardwired for Ancient Greek,’ but it says in the book:

To me, it looked like: ATNYU MES GDERAN GOMEN MEPROUIM.

Transposed letters.  Why isn’t it that the letters turn Greekish?  How does “no, you’re supposed to be Greek letters” turn into “let’s switch up the M and the O; that’ll work”?

Every time this book tries to explain stuff, it just gets more confusing.  And it’s not like there weren’t perfectly decent work-arounds.  Dyslexia doesn’t always present as jumbled letters, so there’s no reason he couldn’t just have trouble reading in general, get diagnosed with dyslexia because no one knows it’s magic, and then later go “oh, hey, so that was magic the whole time.  Okay, then.”

Well, enough of misappropriated real-life disorders and on to the actual story.  The kids smell food and want to go in the emporium, but Grover gets antsy and thinks there’s monsters in there.  He sensed the  monsters on the bus before they showed up, too.  I can imagine that the kids would ignore him, because the smell of hamburgers when you’re hungry can do that, but it really does zap all suspense for the readers.

So they go inside and there’s lots and lots of statues around of all sorts of animals and creatures and children and such.  Then a woman in a burqa shows up, and she tut-tuts over them as Percy clumsily lies about them being separated from their circus caravan.  The woman, while probably laughing uproariously on the inside, lets them in and tells them she’ll feed them.  At least it’s clear that Percy’s lie is supposed to look silly and be unconvincing. 

“Your head is full of kelp.”

😛

He also explains that, in retrospect, he should have seen that it was a monster lair, but he was really, really hungry, and the burgers just smelled so awesome you guys, and honestly, it’s such a 12 year old thing to do anyway.  Although I’m not sure why he has to explicitly point that out, instead of just saying that the burgers smelled good enough to skip thinking about anything else. 

Aunty Em stiffened, as if Annabeth had done something wrong, but then the old woman relaxed just as quickly, so I figured it must’ve been my imagination.

And there’s stuff like this, which is painfully obvious to me but probably not to the target demographic.  So why does he need to also stop and talk to the reader and justify going into a monster den, when we’re already getting all the heavy-handed clues we need?

So Em feeds the kids and then they all sit around talking about her business.  Percy notes how extremely detailed all the statues are, Em talks about how she used to have two sisters, and Annabeth finally starts to put it together.  She and Grover want to go and start insisting on leaving, but Percy gets all sleepy and suggestible and doesn’t pick up on them all but shouting “MONSTER.”

Em wants to ‘take a photo’ of them before they go, ostensibly to use to model a new statue set, so Percy agrees, because he’s still…I don’t know, high on French fries, or whatever she used to dose him.  Which, fine, he’s clearly not in his right mind in this passage.  …but why do Annabeth and Grover go along?

Right before she takes off her veil, Annabeth shoves the boys over so they don’t look up and puts on her invisible cap.  Percy gets a glance at her in a reflection and realizes that she’s Medusa.  I like calling her Em, though.  Maybe because it’s shorter to type.

Instead of fighting Percy, for some reason Em decides to talk to him, making even more ominous comments about his quest and how it’ll only end in failure and yadda, yadda, yadda.  We got the same thing from the Furies, didn’t we?

Grover comes in on his flying shoes to whack her with a branch.  He keeps her busy while Annabeth tells Percy that he’s got to kill Em.  Apparently he has to do it because he’s got the cool sword and because Em wants to keep Percy whole (for statue-y reasons) but she wants to shred Annabeth for being Athena’s daughter.

“Roooaaarrr!”

…

……

So, moving on.  Percy slices off her head with no difficulty at all, because…I don’t know, maybe Em was just bored and wanted to regenerate somewhere else?  Moving is kind of a hassle.

Percy decides that he’s kind of sick of this whole gods and mythology thing getting him in fights, so he goes into Em’s office for shipping supplies, and MAILS HER HEAD TO OLYMPUS.  Brownie points, book.  Massive, massive brownie points.  That’s pretty awesome.  He also finds the billing address to the Underworld, which for some reason I find hilarious.

Again, the strong points in this novel are when gets irreverent about mixing mythology and modern day.  It’s kind of hard to properly give it space in these reviews, because it’s really all in the little details.  Like, just the fact that Medusa owns a functioning statuary business, and she keeps records for sales she made to Hades.  I’m just tickled pink by that.