The Sea of Monsters

The Sea of Monsters is a 2006 children's novel based on Greek mythology and the second book in Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson & the Olympians series, following The Lightning Thief. It was released by Miramax Books, an imprint of Hyperion Books for Children, and it is the second of the five novels in that original sequence. The plot is built on the Odyssey: the Sea of Monsters is this series' version of the waters Greek heroes sailed, and the story borrows the Cyclops, the Golden Fleece and an island of enchantment.

Percy narrates in the first person and the book treats the myths as a system rather than a set of references. The gods are real and mostly absent, the monsters are the ones the older stories named, and the camp is a school where the rules of the myths are simply the rules of the world. Tyson, the homeless child Percy has befriended at his ordinary school, turns out to be a Cyclops, which gives the novel its argument about who is allowed to be a hero and who is expected to be a monster.

The book was generally well received and was nominated for several awards, and it sold strongly in paperback and in audiobook. Three further novels complete the original series, with later books and spin-offs set in the same world, and the story has since been adapted as a film and as part of a television series. Its shape is a quest with a deadline, which is the form the rest of the series keeps to.