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

Another year gone, and another adventure for Percy Jackson and his friends, Annabeth and Thalia. Thalia's imprisonment in the tree was lifted at the end of the last book, and now she's helping Percy and Annabeth rescue two young Half-Bloods from military school.

Grover has been sent there to befriend, keep an eye on, and extract them, but he's having trouble doing the last one because of one of the teachers at the School, Dr. Thorn. Thorn is actually a monster, and if it's up to him the two kids, brother and sister Bianca and Nico, will die before they ever get to Camp Half-Blood.

Percy goes to help them and discovers that Dr. Thorn is actually the Manticore, and is too much for even Percy to handle. He and his friends are only saved with the aid of Artemis, who shows up with her huntresses and pulls Percy and his friends bacon out of the fire- all except for Annabeth, who is thrown over a cliff by the Manticore and thought dead and lost.

But from the comments of the Manticore, Percy has discovered that it was working for someone called "The General", who has unleashed "The Doom of Olympus", and Artemis says it is her job to hunt it. Alone. So she sends her huntresses back to Camp Half-Blood to stay in the usually deserted Artemis building (because Artemis is a virgin- she'll never have half-blood kids).

This makes her Huntresses unhappy, especially the first among them, a chick named Zoë, but when Percy has a dream about Annabeth and Artemis being imprisoned, he decides to ask the Oracle for help about what it all means. And she eventually tells them that they need to send five people out to save Artemis- Three Huntresses and two from Camp. Grover is one of the people going- they'll need his tracking skills, but Thalia is picked as the other camper, and as part of the Huntresses, Zoë chooses Bianca.

Percy wants to help rescue Annabeth, his friend, so he sneaks off after the group. And when one of the Huntresses is taken out by the Stoll brothers, children of Hermes, Percy is asked by Hermes himself to try to bring Luke, his child, back into the fold. Percy agrees to try, and Hermes helps speed him on his way to the others, who reluctantly let Percy join their group. Percy also tells Nico that he'll look out for Bianca, but according to the Oracle's prophecy, they will lose two of their group on the way there- one in the desert land, and one to a blow from his or her father. But who will they lose?. And with Thalia about to turn 16, will the prophecy be fulfilled, or will she find some way to buy the Gods more time? And just who is "the General", and what is "The Doom of Olympus"?

Another excellent book in the Percy Jackson series. In this one, Percy is here to rescue his friend Annabeth, who he may be starting to like as more than a friend. Dare he hope that she might feel the same way? But when he finds literature in her stuff that suggests she might be considering life as a Huntress of Artemis, girls who don't age and never get interested in boys, he feels awfully bad.

The Huntresses get lots of play in this book, and Percy could almost like them, if they didn't view boys as something akin to the Bubonic plague. But Percy is starting to have dreams with Zoë, where he relives something of her background, and she apparently was turned off boys by a disastrous romance with a hero... who might be Hercules. And since his point of view is from the point of view of the boy in that romance, does this mean that Percy is Hercules reborn? His defeat of the Nemean Lion gives credence to this reading. But is it really true?

The ending to this book was quite a surprise. Thalia gives the Gods more time to prepare for the coming of the Hero Half-Blood, Annabeth is rescued, and Pan is revealed to be alive... somewhere. Only two more books to go, but I can't wait! Highly recommended.