“October. Best month ever.

The air was crisp. The leaves were changing colors in Central Park. And my favorite food cart on 86th Street was serving pumpkin-spice burritos.”

The Wrath of the Triple Goddess was released in October, just in time for Halloween. The first sentences of the novel capture the seasonal mood and set the scene of New York City in autumn, including a humorous reference to the widespread popularity of pumpkin spice. Both Halloween and New York City are prominent elements across the novel.

“There was a lot to unpack in that statement. My big takeaway was that Hecate was going trick-or-treating. She seemed to believe that Halloween had been created just for her.”

The above passage exemplifies Rick Riordan’s characteristic use of incongruity for comic effect. Up to this point, the scene emphasizes Hecate’s terrifying power and explained why she will be traveling around the world: “[A]t the end of October, people still remember me! So I must travel the world and make my presence known” (12). Percy thus concludes that because she will be going “trick-or-treating,” an activity associated with children, and that this is why she wants him and his friends to pet-sit for her, a comically mundane need and request.

“I’d had a bad experience at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and by bad experience I mean almost getting killed by my sixth-grade math teacher when she turned out to be a Fury.”

Across the novel, Riordan incorporates references to events and characters from earlier books in his Percy Jackson universe. In the scene above, Annabeth and her classmates are working on an assignment that asks them how they would redesign the Metropolitan Museum of Art.