The Titan's Curse

I feel the need to confess something before I go ahead with my thoughts on the third book in the Percy Jackson series. I think I’m getting too involved in the fictional lives of these characters. At this stage of the game, Percy is a 14-year-old son of Poseidon, the sea god. His friend Annabeth is also 14, a daughter of Athena. Now, normally, just knowing little things about the characters that you read about is an okay thing. But the other night I had a dream that I was Percy Jackson. Scratch that… I was me, but I was the son of Poseidon on a dangerous quest. Little problem with that… I kind of can’t swim. Like, at all. And Annabeth wasn’t Annabeth. She was the Girl in the White SUV. I mean, that part was all right. But I think I should probably take a break from these books.

Now, I have been trying to read other things between the Percy Jackson books. Obviously that hasn’t helped. But enough about my deep psychological problems. This is supposed to be my thoughts on The Titan’s Curse. As I said before, this is book three in Rick Riordan’s series. This time around, we pick up the action in the winter, which is odd compared to the previous installments. Before this, we learned that Percy’s summers are spent at Camp Half-Blood, a place where young demigods learn how to become heroes and defend themselves against the monsters that will inevitably attack them in the real world. But now, Percy and his friends, Annabeth and Thalia (the recently revived daughter of Zeus), must help Grover (a satyr) retrieve two new demigods before they are kidnapped or killed by the series’ villain, Luke.

Complicated enough? Good. It gets crazier. The action begins almost immediately when a battle with a manticore breaks out. Annabeth is kidnapped and taken to an unknown place and the goddess Artemis goes missing while hunting a monster that could bring about the downfall of Olympus. Still with me? Well, try and keep up. One of Artemis’ huntresses accepts a quest to go in search of the missing goddess and she decides to take several people along with her, but leaves Percy behind. Meanwhile, in his growing concern for his missing friend, he dreams about Annabeth being forced to take over the task of holding up the sky, a curse that the Titan Atlas had been tasked with millennia ago. So Percy sneaks away from camp, secretly following the group on the quest and eventually meeting up with them, and helping them to succeed in saving Annabeth and Artemis in time for the winter solstice, at which point the gods of Olympus would vote whether or not to once again go to war with the Titans.

I say that I’m connecting too much with these fictional characters. But I suppose that’s a testament to Riordan’s abilities as an author. As much as I loved the Harry Potter books, I never lost myself in the stories or dreamed that I was fighting Lord Voldemort. These are excellent stories. They’re engaging and exciting. I say I should take a break, but I’m too interested in what happens next to be able to just stop reading. As I write this, I’m about halfway through the next book, The Battle of the Labyrinth. The Last Olympian is the final book in the series, and I think I may cry when I get to the end of it. But there is hope. Riordan is working on a sequel series, the first book of which will be released later this year. It’s a disease… I know…