Percy Jackson and the Olympians 3 – The Titan’s Curse

Rick Riordan's The Titan's Curse is the third Percy Jackson adventure, a Greek-myth quest for 10 year olds that starts with a rescue going badly wrong.

What happens

It opens with a mother packing her son an overnight bag and a few deadly weapons, then driving him eight hours through a blizzard to a boarding school in Maine. Percy is mortified. Not about the weapons. About depending on his mum for a lift to his own battles.

She talks the whole way, because she's nervous, and gets through every embarrassing baby story she has while Annabeth and Thalia sit there enjoying it enormously.

Westover Hall looks like an evil knight's castle. Grover is inside undercover and has sent a distress call. He's found two new half-bloods, a brother and sister, ten and twelve, and there's something in the building that has worked out what they are.

There's a school dance on, so the plan is to dance. Which means Percy, who has never actually danced at a dance, and Annabeth, who has grown taller than him since the summer, shuffling around the gym floor and trying to look natural while a monster watches from the doorway.

That is Riordan's trick, and it works every time. The joke and the danger share the same sentence. Percy tells it all himself, dry and a bit fed up, and he is always the last person in the room to understand what is going on.

Two things worth flagging. This is the third book, and it walks straight into friendships that were built in the first two. Everyone has history, and your reader will feel the gaps if they start here.

And the stakes have gone up. There's fighting, there are injuries, somebody Percy cares about is lost early on, and the book does not tidy that away. The Titan's Curse is noticeably darker than the one before it, and the grief runs underneath everything that follows.

That's also why readers who have come this far tend to love it. It's the book where the series stops being a romp and starts costing the characters something.

What to read next

If your reader hasn't met any of them yet, start with the first Percy Jackson book. Percy is twelve, about to be thrown out of school again, and quite sure that nobody will believe him about what his maths teacher turned into.