Insipid Percy is back with more adventures where Annabeth saves his life a lot and he slowly realizes that he is not that great of a guy and he should probably grow up a little (or a lot). I love the mythology aspects, but Riordan is not a very good writer. The rules change from moment to moment, the sheer number of children is outrageous and never explained, and he drops the ball a lot on some potentially good moments. When Percy asks why the gods didn't kill him to prevent a prophecy, Annabeth has some crappy reasons they didn't -- if Riordan really wanted to show the gods as terrible or true to their old portrayal, he would have written it so that the gods did try to kill Percy, but couldn't because of the prophecy, for example. I do like that Luke and Circe have good reasons for being villains (the gods really are shitty, after all), but it would help if I understand why Percy sides with the gods each time.