The second of the Percy Jackson series, and I liked it as well as the first. It doesn't truly excite me, but it's a decent enough way to pass a couple of hours. These books have an interesting tone - very flippant - and while I can see how appealing they would be to kids in general, I wonder if they would have appealed to me when I was a kid. Thinking back to my childhood obsession with Susan Cooper and her Dark Is Rising series, part of the attraction was that it was grim and serious and had a lot going on underneath. Percy Jackson is none of those things, and everything is laid out right on the surface, but I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing. It's just a different thing, and if it doesn't speak to me so much, it strikes me as a series that would particularly appeal to boys, and that's undoubtedly a good thing. It can be very difficult finding middle-grade books that boys want to read, and we need more of them.