Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Titan's Curse by: Rick Riordan

 

After The Sea of Monsters, I will admit that my enthusiasm for continuing Percy Jackson and the Olympians had decreased somewhat.  However, I pressed on and continued to the third novel, The Titan’s Curse which I can say up front was a marked improvement over not only The Sea of Monsters, but also The Lightning Thief.  This book marks the halfway point in the initial pentalogy and feels like the point where Riordan is ramping up the tension.  The first key decision that Riordan makes in this novel is setting it in winter, halfway between The Sea of Monsters and The Battle of the Labyrinth.  The inciting incident isn’t some monster attack on Percy, getting him expelled from school, but Percy, Thalia, and Annabeth being called on by Grover to help escort two half-bloods to camp.  Yes, there is an early action fight with a monster, this time a manticore in the employ of Luke and Kronos which is another decision that ties it into the main plot.  Dr. Thorne, the manticore in question, kidnaps Annabeth allowing Rick to reuse his formula of getting one of the main trio out of the action.  Annabeth’s capture is handled much better here than Grover’s was in The Sea of Monsters.  Grover’s capture never felt for Percy like the danger was real: the dreams early on were written off as odd, and they were a bit generic.  Rick leaves Percy, and the reader in suspense as to if Annabeth is even alive, only giving a few dreams throughout the book to Percy.  This creates tension for both the character and the reader much more effectively.

 

Putting Annabeth in danger and making that danger feel real by allowing Percy to have a hand in the reason she is captured (he goes off after the half-blood siblings as they are escorted out of school by the manticore) gives a deeper emotional involvement for the character.  They feel more real and compounding these stakes with the fact that the world is at stake makes The Titan’s Curse feel like there is a real danger.  During much of the climax, Riordan reveals more of Luke’s plan to raise Kronos and actually makes him a threatening villain whereas in The Sea of Monsters he just showed up to be intimidating.  He has to be fought with the “big bad” of the novel, whom I will not spoil, making the climax especially engaging, even if the resolution then resembles the final few chapters of The Lightning Thief.  Although Annabeth isn’t in the novel, Riordan introduces her father in a sequence that is perhaps the most memorable and most in parallel to Percy’s relationship with his stepfather from the first novel and a mirror with Paul Blofis, a minor character who is revealed to have begun a relationship with Percy’s mother.  Dr. Chase is meant to represent an understanding of family making it through difficult times and fixing broken relationships.  He was never an abusive parent: a failure to protect his daughter, but not from lack of trying (Annabeth may have been misinterpreting his signals) and he is a fascinating character in his short scenes.  Percy also isn’t chosen to take part in this book’s quest, which is an interesting decision as it gives him better motivation to go off on his own.  There are two points in the novel where Dionysus is actually given more depth and hints at being a more important god and more complex than previously thought.  First, he lets Percy go on the quest when by his own admission, he should have stopped him, and second, he provides aid at one point during the book, even using Percy’s correct name showing that there is something more to the character.

 

Percy’s quest in The Titan’s Curse is summarized by Aphrodite as one for love.  It is made clear to everyone except Percy that there is a romance between him and Annabeth: this is the reason that he went on the quest and the reason he blames himself for her capture.  He is losing his innocence and growing up, getting closer to the age of sixteen and while Thalia could also be the child of prophecy, he very easily can still be the one it speaks of.  The loss of innocence is a subtle theme running throughout the novel: Riordan introduces Artemis and her hunters as a group of maidens who have sworn off romance for immortality, and the hunters are portrayed partially as childish.  There are hunters who childishly act like boys and men are inferior because they are immortal teenagers who never had to grow up.  While equating romance to a loss of innocence isn’t the best analogy, for what Riordan is going for it works.  Artemis is portrayed as both young and old, innocent and experienced in the ways of the world.  There is something both childlike, yet incredibly strong about the goddess.  Early in the book one of the half-blood siblings, Bianca Di Angelo, joins the Hunters of Artemis and it is portrayed as almost reclaiming her innocence.  Bianca is a character who has been responsible for taking care of her younger brother Nico and sees the Hunters as a way to reclaim the childhood she never had and her own identity.  Riordan does not portray Bianca as wrong for doing so.  She is a little rash perhaps, but not a bad person or really dodging a responsibility, even though it hurts Nico.  She has to deal with the consequences of her decisions and her arc ends in tragedy.

 

Nico, on the other hand, while a minor character only appearing in the bookends of the novel, gets his own arc.  He starts as a complete innocent: wide-eyed, liking a card game, and finding the knowledge of being a half-blood like a game.  He is what Percy perhaps could have been if he was introduced to the world of gods and monsters naturally, but by the end of the book that innocence is gone and he doesn’t quite know how to cope with that.  Thalia Grace also has her own arc about growing up.  She and Percy have a much more interesting dynamic than simply rivals: there is a mutual respect and friendship, but Riordan writes them as similar thinkers in many ways which is where they clash because of the few differences they have.  The differences are simple and stark which makes for an interesting dynamic between the two of them.  Early on they are put into the position of co-captains for capture the flag against the Hunters of Artemis and their styles of leadership clash with one another like the sky clashing with the sea.  They both want to go on the quest and both are close friends.  Finally, there is a sea creature which follows Percy from a myth about the Titans which represents innocence in its purest form.

 

This isn’t to say that The Titan’s Curse is a perfect book.  The formula of The Lightning Thief is followed pretty closely which makes it feel a bit repetitive in places.  Zoe Nightshade, while a fun character with her own moments, has a final fate that feels just a bit cliched.  Overall, The Titan’s Curse shows that the series is going places and makes enough changes in the formula to make things interesting.  It leaves the characters in different places then they started and shows that Rick Riordan is not writing a static series: things will change, characters will die.  It is not going down a darker path, but it makes the book feel more real and the pending danger of Kronos present.  9/10.