Like The Lightning Thief, The Sea of Monsters incorporated an impressive number of characters from Greek mythology, and the quest du jour took Percy Jackson and his friends on an unpredictable journey with many twists and turns. As the second book in a series, though, The Sea of Monsters didn't start off as smoothly as I would have liked. While I can see the benefit of making each book a stand-alone book, the explicit explanations of character backgrounds, plot summary, and the premise itself were forced and awkward. And for some reason, even though I was okay with the first-person narrative by the end of The Lightning Thief, it still came across as too informal, and perhaps even a bit lazy, in this book.
Another underwhelming aspect of this book was the manner in which Percy and his friends were frequently saved from imminent doom at the very last minute completely out of the blue by a third party. Other times, Percy conveniently discovered and immediately mastered a sea-related talent just in time to put it to use in some heroic fashion. It seemed almost as if Riordan kept writing himself into corners just so he could resolve them with dramatic rescues. Hopefully this is not the beginning of a pattern for the rest of the series.
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