This second installment in Ursu’s mythologically-themed trilogy picks up where The Shadow Thieves left off. A red-headed eighth-grader named Charlotte Mielswetzki and her mixed-race English cousin Zee (now living in Minnesota near Charlotte) are feeling the effects of their previous adventure. Although they saved the world, they can’t tell anyone about what happened; who would believe that the Greek gods are real? Their parents are responding differently to what ended up being only a single night of unexplained absence: Charlotte is “super-mega-grounded” and Zee is being treated as if he’s made of glass. This new distance between the 13-year-olds and their parents, the overwhelming sense of the unfairness of the world, is sketched lightly, but any tween will relate.

Into this unhappy stasis bursts another set of divine beings in the form of an ageless gentleman in a startling aqua-colored three-piece suit and a new and very cute green-eyed eighth-grader. We learn that Charlotte and Zee’s underworld nemesis Philonecron is the grandson of Poseidon, and, as anyone will remember from Odysseus’s encounter with the Cyclops, Poseidon does not respond well to mortals messing with his progeny. This upper-world adventure is less creepy than the first and also snarkier: Poseidon’s yacht is absurdly tacky and ostentatious (“like the student committee for the eighth-grade Under the Sea Dance had gone way over budget”). Zee is less prominent in this book, which is a shame since Ursu’s voice in his sections is sure and entertaining. But there are just as many roller-coaster thrills as the cousins again battle the gods to save the innocent. Marine mythology both familiar (e.g. Scylla, Charybdis, Keto) and not (fish-tailed centaurs and a genteel giant squid) provides a lively background for this funny and exciting second volume of the Cronus Chronicles. -- Clara Hardy