[My main beef with this, besides being practically pointless, was that Egg is so immature. I get that it's a MG book, but there is a difference between being a child and being plain childish. So as he fancies himself in love with Millicent and pines for her, when she does show up, she's not quite as he remembered...she's dirty and smelly and her hair isn't washed and she's even, heaven forbid, a little grumpy. But he's mad at her for not being as he wanted. He's finding it a little hard to love her now. Not to mention that she's engaged to Cyril, and Egg is ticked at Millicent for going and getting herself engaged to Cyril and never mentioning it to him. Understandable, I suppose, though Millicent really had nothing to do with it, but the way it's written made me want to slap Egg.
Besides those annoyances, we realize that Egg's family is still alive, though for how long no one can be quite sure. And maybe absence does make the heart grow fonder, for Egg's father and brother treat him significantly better than they ever had before.
And Burn Healy, the best part of this entire book! We now know that the dread pirate is Egg's uncle. The growing relationship between Egg and Healy was very cute and wonderful to read, even if it was only maybe the extent of 10 pages.
(show spoiler)
Hopefully the downfalls of this book arose primarily from the curse of the middle book and the third book, Blue Sea Burning, is an improvement.