Previously on Percy Jackson: The Sea of Monsters: Luke did not want to be turned back to the light side. Then we took a detour to reference Circe because we’re speedrunning The Odyssey here. Onto the sirens!
So as mentioned, Percy and Annabeth have escaped Circe, but now to sail past a bunch of sirens to get to their destination. Annabeth tells Percy she wants to hear the sirens’ song, and Percy’s like, “Hmm, that sounds really dumb, since they’ll kill you and all.” Annabeth’s like, “Stop saying words.” Sirens will apparently show you your heart’s true desire, and Annabeth wants to know what they’ll show her since wanting to know things is her entire personality. Percy reluctantly agrees to tie her up and stuff wax in his own ears so he’ll be immune.
They approach the island and Percy admits that he too is curious as to what the sirens sound like: How could music cause so many lives to veer off course? I mean, sure, there were some Top Forty songs that made me want to take a fiery nosedive, but still. Heh. I hated “Bad Day” too, Percy.
In the five minutes that Percy doesn’t look at Annabeth while he sails, she manages to cut her ropes and jump overboard — because “[Percy] totally forgot to disarm her.” Percy, my dude, you had one job. Anyway, he also jumps overboard and swims after her. He manages to see what she’s seeing, which is her dad and Athena back together; Annabeth as a famous architect; and Luke with them, being not-evil anymore and part of her family. Percy manages to pull her back from the sirens and realizes that she can’t hear the sirens’ song if they’re underwater — Of course, Annabeth wouldn’t be able to breathe, but at the moment, that seemed like a minor problem. Heh. He pulls Annabeth under and makes a bubble of air around them. Annabeth comes to her senses and starts crying all over him, which Percy actually handles pretty well, considering he’s a 13-year-old boy.
(This was, I think, the first moment where I was like, “Is the TV show kind of dumb?” — they change it so that they have wax! But oh no, it’s stolen from them! And now they have to face the sirens! And Annabeth does, but just kidding, it’s a trick and she’s actually about to get eaten! But it’s okay, Percy manages to save her because he was able to resist the sirens for…reasons! It’s so bizarre and convoluted when the book’s version makes perfect sense.)
Percy tells Annabeth that he saw what the Mirror of Erised sirens were showing her, and Annabeth says the sirens also show you your fatal flaw: she saw herself rebuilding the world better (faster, stronger), which makes her fatal flaw hubris. (Percy: “That brown stuff they spread on veggie sandwiches?” Annabeth: “No, Seaweed Brain. That’s hummus.” Har har har.) Percy decides not to needle her about the other parts of her vision, re: her parental issues and massive crush on Luke. Man, he’s more emotionally intelligent than the boys I was in eighth grade with.
They sail on a little more and finally make it to Cyclops Island, where they immediately trip over Clarisse. She apparently crash-landed there after her ship blew up, and is now tied up and Polyphemus is about to eat her for his wedding feast. Clarisse is like, “You’re going to marry GROVER the SATYR?” Polyphemus is like, “Huh?” and she’s like, “You know, the satyr who’s right here, wearing a wedding dress?” Polyphemus still doesn’t get it, and everyone’s like, “He doesn’t know what you’re saying!! Just stop talking!!” but Clarisse just keeps banging on that GROVER is a SATYR and NOT A FEMALE CYCLOPS and Polyphemus DEFINITELY SHOULD EAT HIM, NOT MARRY HIM. Eventually, Polyphemus twigs to what she’s saying, and everyone facepalms at her blowing up their spot.
Grover convinces Polyphemus that he ought to properly cook him with some mango chutney instead of eating him raw; Polyphemus falls for this and lumbers out to go find some mangoes, giving our heroes enough time to hatch a plan. Polyphemus has sealed Grover and Clarisse inside his cave, and the only way in is to wait for him to move the massive rock in front of the entrance. Accordingly, Percy and Annabeth sneak in when Polyphemus comes back (Annabeth with her invisibility cap, Percy clinging to the underside of a massive sheep, God bless), blah blah they fight him blah, blah blah referencing the Odyssey blah. They almost manage to take him out, but the Cyclops plays on Percy’s sympathies since they’re technically half-brothers, and Percy’s moment of hesitation gives Polyphemus enough time to get back on his feet. Percy, sometimes, your brother is gonna try to make you do stuff that you don’t want to do, like drive across the Golden Gate Bridge at 6 AM because he went to a party and doesn’t want to pay for an Uber back, and you gotta put your foot down.
(By the by, the TV show has it so that Polyphemus is onto Grover’s ruse from the start, and is only pretending to believe that he’s a lady Cyclops for his own amusement; in the book, Polyphemus only has this one moment of trickery.)
Anyway, Tyson comes to the rescue, because of course he’s not dead. You’re shocked, I’m sure. He shoves Polyphemus off a cliff and explains that one of Poseidon’s hippocampi rescued him when Clarisse’s ship blew up, and then he just…followed the smell of sheep, I guess, until he found the island. He fetches the Golden Fleece, which they use to heal Annabeth, who got sideswiped by Polyphemus, blah blah drama over her almost dying but then she doesn’t. Then they try to leave the island, but surprise! Polyphemus isn’t dead and they have to fight him again, some more. Book, do we have to do this? I am so tired.
Polyphemus lobs rocks at them — not at all helped by Clarisse’s taunting — and manages to hit the Queen Anne’s Revenge, which sinks. Luckily for them, Tyson is a horse boy, and he and Percy summon the hippocampi to save them. They zoom away from the island while Polyphemus shakes his fist in the background.
They make it back to Miami, and Clarisse yells at Percy about how he ruined her quest. Percy has a flash of empathy and thinks he’d be pissed too, if he were a secondary character having his time in the sun and the plot got stolen out from under him by two snotty main characters. He also doesn’t want her to return empty-handed because he knows Ares will take his anger out on her. Aw, Percy really is such an empathetic kid. Clarisse reveals the ominous part of her prophecy is that she would fail without friends, and fly home alone. Percy realizes that’s not ominous at all: Clarisse won’t fail, because she has friends now (well, kind of), and she’s going to fly back to camp with the Fleece by plane. Tyson’s recovered Hermes’s bag of cash, but it’s only enough for one ticket (and also, Zeus will zap Percy out of the sky anyway), so the rest of our gang has to stay behind.
Clarisse speeds off with the Fleece, and not a moment too soon, because surprise! Luke and his henchmen show up and are all, “Haha, there are still 50 pages left in this book!” They herd our heroes onto the Princess Andromeda and get their threat on about how they were planning to let Percy do the hard work of getting the Fleece, and now they’re going to steal it from him (how very Nancy Drew villain of them). Luke flips his shit when Percy tells him that the Fleece is already gone, and Percy takes advantage of his ranting to sneakily send an Iris message to camp. He gets Luke to ramble about how ’twas he who poisoned Thalia’s tree (somehow? I guess one of the other campers let him in?) to get everyone looking for the Fleece — although he does say he was going to let the camp have it once he was done with it, which weirds Percy out. Let’s not worry about that right now, though, we’re having a dramatic reveal: Luke was going to use the Fleece to heal Kronos, whose employ he of course is in, why is Percy even asking, didn’t we go over this in the last book already? Percy reveals that all of Camp Half-Blood is watching and knows Luke is evil now. Mr. D sighs that they’ll have to reinstate Chiron and banishes Tantalus back to the Underworld.
Luke is not at all pleased about this and decides that he has to kill Percy now. Again. Percy tries to taunt him so that Annabeth and Grover can at least get away, and Luke’s all, “You can’t bait me into a fight!” and then Percy baits him into a fight anyway. Sure. They duel and Luke is winning, but thankfully a deus ex machina shows up: Chiron and his cousins, who call themselves the “Party Ponies” and say things like “Dude” and “Righteous”. I bet this is very hilarious if you’re nine years old (and I mean that as a compliment, given the target age range of these books).
The centaurs carry our gang away, leaving Luke shaking his fist on the ship. Chiron explains how he knew Percy was in trouble, blah blah convenience blah it’s not important. Percy frets that Peter Pettigrew Luke got away and he failed to stop Voldemort Kronos from rising again, and Chiron comforts him that they’ll fight again another day. He gives Percy a big speech about how being a demigod means Percy can walk in both the mortal and mythological world and with great power comes great responsibility, etc. Percy’s like, “I don’t get it” and Chiron’s like, “Maybe it’s not worth explaining this to a 13-year-old.”
Chiron adds that Kronos is going to try and kill Percy now that he wasn’t able to turn him to the dark side, and Percy’s like, “Wow, only someone with a deep knowledge of how Kronos’s mind works would have been able to figure that out!” Ah, yes, remember how the book was hinting earlier that there’s ~*~something~*~ suspicious about Chiron? Chiron reveals that he does in fact know Kronos well, because Kronos is his father. Percy’s all, “Awkward”, and then we cut to the next chapter, wherein Percy says he didn’t press Chiron on the matter, figuring he didn’t want to talk about it: I mean, I’ve met plenty of embarrassing parents, but Kronos, the evil titan lord who wanted to destroy Western Civilization? Not the kind of dad you invited to school for career day. Yeah, it’s a good thing he’s not your grandfather, Percy.
Anyway, they go back to camp, where apparently there’s been a big battle and a bunch of kids are wounded, not that we really feel the effect of that since we only ever spend about ten pages per book at camp. Chiron puts the Fleece on Thalia’s tree and everyone waits for the magic to work.
In the meantime, Hermes comes to visit Percy. (Percy, upon seeing him: I wasn’t sure whether I was supposed to kneel or buy stamps from him or what. Hee.) Percy’s like, “Yeah…sorry I totally failed at the whole reason you sent me on this quest. Your son is pretty messed up man.” Hermes asks Percy if he feels like Poseidon abandoned him, and Percy’s like, “Obviously.” But then, as he muses on it, he realizes that Poseidon might’ve been trying to help him by bringing him and Tyson together, seeing as Tyson saved him multiple times over the course of his quest. He accepts that perhaps his dad is looking out for him for about five seconds, then Hermes gives Percy a letter from Poseidon that just says, “Brace yourself”, and Percy gets salty over his dad ignoring him again.
The chariot races go ahead, and Percy tries to apologize to Tyson for being ashamed of him. Tyson tells Percy that he prayed to Poseidon to send him a friend, and he thinks Percy was Poseidon’s answer, so in a way, Poseidon was being a good dad after all! (Sidebar: Tyson also mentions that Cyclopses grow up on the streets to teach them to be grateful and not evil like Polyphemus, which doesn’t seem to track with that random evil Cyclops that Annabeth came across? I don’t know if we’re suggesting they’re naturally evil or not.) Tyson gives Percy a watch to help with the race; Percy uses it at the last minute and it turns into a shield that protects their chariot from the other cabins’ attacks. When they win the laurels, Annabeth announces that they owe their win — and their lives, too — to Tyson, whom Percy loudly claims as his brother. Tyson cries and Annabeth kisses Percy on the cheek. Aw.
Like two weeks later, though, Tyson announces he’s leaving: Poseidon has invited him to live under the sea (🎶) and work in the forges with the other Cyclopses. Percy is both sad over losing Tyson and salty, once again, that Poseidon seems to be ignoring him while inviting Tyson to go live in his kingdom. They’re going to bond and have wacky musical numbers together while Percy tries not to get killed for another year! Nevertheless, Annabeth and Grover come to find him after Tyson leaves, and Percy acknowledges that you can’t just add a fourth person to your YA trio, you know? Not in so many words.
That night, Percy has more ominous dreams, with Kronos taunting him that he’s a fool, a fool!, to think that this was not all according to keikaku. When he wakes up, the camp is all aflutter because something is happening at Thalia’s tree. Recalling that Annabeth was on guard duty, Percy thinks something happened to her and goes tearing up the hill. When he gets there, he realizes that Kronos has, in fact, outsmarted them: the Fleece worked so well that it resurrected Thalia out of the tree, so now there’s another Big Three kid to potentially turn to the dark side. Suspense!
All jokes aside — you know, this wasn’t my favorite of the series when I was a kid (I was a fanfic-writing little shipper so all I really cared about was getting to the Percy/Annabeth kissing in the later books, RIP), but upon reread, I liked it a lot, maybe even better than the other books in the series. There’s a lot of good character stuff in this book, and it’s nice to see Clarisse get more depth — the later books get a little crowded with 2-3 new characters per book (Thalia, the di Angelos, Rachel Dare, Ethan Nakamura, etc), and this book reminded me that I kinda liked when the gang was smaller, and I wish the other books spent as much time fleshing the characters out. Even the sidequests, like the sirens, feel a little meatier with revealing new information or giving the characters a chance to bond, than some of the other books.
Anyway! The book ends here, so we’ll have to wait to see how Thalia’s return affects our heroes. Will Thalia turn to the dark side? Will she and Percy get along? How many awkward attempts at describing her Hot Topic wardrobe will there be? We’ll find out!
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