The fourth book in Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series, The Battle of the Labyrinth, is in my opinion the worst of the series. Despite being the worst, it is still a solid book. The Battle of the Labyrinth begins after Percy and friends return to camp where they find an entrance to the labyrinth. They are given the information that Luke is planning to lead an army of monsters through the Labyrinth in order to attack Camp Half-blood. Realizing this, Percy and Annabeth, along with Grover and Tyson get the help of a mortal who can see the right way to go. They encounter monsters and Gods along the way to finding Daedalus, the owner of the labyrinth. Grover ends up splitting up and goes with Tyson where he finds Pan, who happens to be dying. Percy and Annabeth get back to Camp Half-blood, which is attacked, and although they fend off the attack, it has a toll. Luke ends up merging with Kronos’s body but is delayed.
Although I enjoy the new characters introduced, specifically Rachel, who comes into a much larger scope in this book, there are a lot of parts that tend to drag on. The whole arc with Nico and King Minos isn’t very interesting. Normally Riordan does a good job at keeping the plot interesting and full of twists, I felt the twists in this book didn’t excite as much. Along with the Nico based twist with him being betrayed, the Quintus twist was also decently predictable. This book still gets a 4 out of 5 in my opinion as it does a good job continuing Percy and Annabeth’s relationship with some good dialogue, and still has some good parts including the arena fight. It also does a good job of setting up the final book in the series.