In book three of the Percy Jackson and the Olypmians series, everything starts out as quickly as in the other novels. Grover has been following up on a couple of potential half-bloods at a military academy and needs Percy and Thalia’s help. He also brings along Thalia, the daughter of Zeus, who sacrificed herself to make sure Luke and Annabeth could get to camp, but was rescued from the tree by the Golden Fleece.
The two half-bloods are Nico and Bianca di Angelo. Little is known about them and as the story progresses Riordan drops little hints that they have some how fallen out of time for a long period of time, such as asking Bianca who the president before last was and she says Roosevelt. They are able to get Bianca and Nico from the school, but Bianca is offered to join the Huntresses of Artemis and accepts the position abandoning her brother to Camp Half-Blood. In the process however Annabeth disappears and is ultimately held hostage by the Titan Atlas. She takes the weight of the sky on her shoulders to supposedly save Luke, but this doesn’t work. The goddess Artemis is later tricked into taking the sky from Artemis.
A quest is granted for three of the huntresses and two of the campers to seeking the monster for which Artemis was seeking. A chase across many US landmarks occurs and Bianca sacrifices herself to rescue everyone from the junkyard of the gods and this ultimately is bad for Percy as Nico has forced him to promise to keep Bianca alive.
Final recap, they trick Atlas back into holding up the sky and Percy temporarily defeats Luke. Once they are in Olympus the gods argue over whether they should kill the Heroes (all of them) and ultimately they don’t, but Thalia joins Artemis’ Huntresses so that the great mysterious prophecy cannot be about her and takes the place of Zoe, who died at her father Atlas’ hands. It is also known, to Percy, Annabeth, Thalia and Grover that Nico and Bianca were children of Hades. We find out much more about them in the following two books of the series.
Again I enjoyed this one, although it seemed a bit forced in places, but it added US history to the various Greek myths and legends and was a tour of many of the US landmarks which I found humorous. Again you can tell the characters are growing up and maturing as their own personal struggles are becoming much more intricate and convoluted than before. Hard to believe the main characters are only supposed to be fourteen-ish.