This was my favorite book in the series so far. It starts setting up the climax of the series, and it’s a little darker than the previous books. It’s still funny, but it’s not as silly as the first two books. As Percy gets older, his “voice” is starting to sound more realistic. He’s also less . . . well . . . stupid in this book. I love Percy, but he is dumb as a post in the first two books. In this book, he doesn’t walk blindly into obvious traps every few dozen pages, he puts slightly more thought into what he’s doing, and he actually defeats a few monsters instead of just battling the monster until he gets rescued. For adult readers, this book is slightly less predictable than the others.

My favorite part of the series is still the humor. There are some very funny lines. I also like seeing the national landmarks and familiar places as the characters travel back and forth across the US. I don’t know much about Greek mythology, but the modern twists on mythology are always interesting to me.

Like the previous books, this one has typos. Also, the rules set up in the previous books are sometimes ignored when they are inconvenient for the plot of the current book. For example, wasn’t Zeus going to blast Percy out of the sky if he ever caught Percy flying again? Percy spends a lot of time riding magical flying animals around the country in this book, and he never seems concerned about Zeus.

This book does a nice job of setting up the next book in the series. It made me eager to read the next one.