Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Sea of Monsters

Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Sea of Monsters (book 2)
by Rick Riordan
Unabridged audiobook, read  by Jesse Bernstein

The story opens as Percy Jackson wakes from a horrible nightmare about his friend Grover. His mom calls him to breakfast, where all the food is colored blue in honor of it being the last day of school. Not only is it the last day, but Percy has stayed out of trouble all year and it looks like this will be the first time in seven years that he has not been kicked out of his school.
Percy hurries off to meet his friend, Tyson whom he rides to school with on the subway. Percy is distracted by his dream as he tells his mom goodbye, that and he keeps thinking that he is seeing something out of the corner of his eye, but when he looks there is nothing there.
Tyson is a large, homeless kid who's only friend is Percy. Tyson gets picked on by the other kids, which often causes him to cry even though he is much larger and stronger than them.
This last day of school sees a group of kids visiting from another school - but they're not kids at all, they're disguised giant cannibals who try to kill Percy in the deadliest game of dodge ball ever played. Fortunately, Annabeth shows up (she had been the shadow that Percy kept noticing) and Tyson is more than just a kid. Unfortunately, the deadly dodge ball game destroys the gymnasium and starts the school on fire.
The three kids escape and do the only thing they can do - go to the Half-blood camp. But, when they arrive, Clorice is leading a group of other campers in an attempt to defend the camp from two giant mechanical bulls.
Chiron has been fired from his position because Thalia's pine tree was poisoned, and he has been replaced by a man named Tantelus who takes an immediate dislike to Percy.
Percy, with help from Hermes, decides to go find and rescue Grover, and while he's at it, retrieve the Golden Fleece which is likely the only thing that can stop Thalia's pine from dying. He has been forbidden a quest of this undertaking, that had been given to Clorice, so Percy, along with Annabeth and Tyson sneak out of camp and catch a ride south towards where Grover is being held. It is just their bad luck that the ship they stowaway on, is being captained by Luke, the son of Hermes that stole the items in the first book, and tried to kill Percy a time or two.
Percy and Annabeth withstand many trials and tribulations to finally end up on the island Grover is being held on, only to be reunited with Tyson who had been missing for the last while, and to find that Clorice is already there and being held captive, too.
The group defeats the evil cyclops, Polythemus and escapes to Miami, only to be attacked by Luke and his cronies. All seems lost until Chrion shows up with a group of other Centaurs and helps drive Luke and his group away.
By the end of the story everything is as it should be, except that the Golden Fleece did a little bit too good of a job on healing Thalia's pine and has actually healed her and separated her out from the tree.
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This was a short and sweet Harry Potter derivative. I had already mentioned when writing about the Lightning Thief how similar the two series are. Well, listening to the second book did nothing to change that view. Maybe derivative is too strong of a term, it's more like using the same formula, but with a smaller budget. The best analogy I can think of is actually literary (huzzah for me). Percy Jackson is to Harry Potter as the Belgariad / Malloreon is to Lord of the Rings. It uses a similar structure to tell a similar story. We see this kind of thing in media all the time. CSI comes along and is a huge success, and suddenly there are all kinds of forensics procedural shows. Some producer, actually several producers, crack the formula and set off to cash in. I'm going to be more generous to Mr. Riordan, though, I think he used the Potter books to fire off his own ideas. I mean, sure, the dude wants to sell books, but I think he's just try to write an entertaining story. And in much the same way that I watch almost all the forensics procedurals, there is room in my life for Harry Potter and Percy Jackson. The Jackson stories just aren't as deep or as broad as the Potter stories. But, that doesn't mean that they're not entertaining.
I had some issues with Mr. Bernstein's reading of the book. The first issue isn't his fault at all, but is something the producer or engineer should have caught, and that is the 'tinny' sound that occurs in several places. I might be Library2Go's fault - that's where I downloaded the files from. The other two issues are definitely Mr. Bernstein's, though his director should have caught it. Bernstein uses the same voice for Percy and Annabeth. Now I don't think that he should have used a falsetto voice, but he might have thrown in a bit of a Southern twang (Annabeth is from Virginia), really anything to help differentiate between the two as they have many conversations together. Particularly towards the end of the book as the action picks up and Riordan drops 'he said' and 'she said'. There were spots that I had to listen to a second time to figure out who was saying what. The other issue is the surfer dude talk. It's bad enough that Luke talks like a surfer dude, but, I'll allow it annoying as it is. But at the end of the book when Chiron brings the centaurs to the kids aid, all of the centaurs taht are not Chiron talk like surfer dudes. Annoying. You wouldn't catch Jim Dale doing a surfer dude, let alone the same surfer dude for a whole gaggle of characters.