"The Titan's Curse" by Rick Riordan

Summary: While Thalia, Annabeth, Grover, and Percy are on a quest to recruit two recently discovered half-bloods, Annabeth disappears and the group meets the goddess Artemis and her Hunters, including the icy Zoe.  When Artemis also goes missing, Thalia, Grover, Percy, Zoe, and Bianca (one of the new half-bloods) go on a quest to rescue her and help save Olympus once again.

Musings: Reading this book has cemented for me the idea that I need to give myself some break time between reading most books in a series.  While I didn't have a lot of good things to say about Riordan's second Percy Jackson book, The Sea of Monsters, I think that stemmed primarily from reading in directly after The Lightning Thief.  Such back-to-back comparisons make exposing flaws and repetitive structure easy while diminishing the positive qualities.

All of this is probably a roundabout way of saying that I enjoyed The Titan's Curse quite a bit.  The introduction and characterization of Artemis was interesting; Thalia and Zoe brought some new personalities into the series.  Because this novel also drew more on Titan mythology (rather than the Odyssey, which was the basis for much of the previous book), I was less familiar with the stories and more engaged in reading about them.  A "twist" at the end of the book should add the necessary steam to get through the rest of the series.

Some of the most interesting themes in the series are still only half-explored, such as the parent-child relationship between the gods and the half-bloods, and the way in which the evolution (or lack thereof) of gender roles has affected the characters.  Nonetheless, this is a middle-grade novel, so I won't be too harsh.  I'll certainly pick up the fourth book, The Battle of the Labyrinth--in a month or two.