PANDORA GETS VAIN

The chick-lit quest tale kicked off in Pandora Gets Jealous (1/08) loses humor and steam in this second episode. Having loosed Evils into the world and been ordered by Zeus to get them back into the famous box, Pandy (Pandora) and her friends Alcie and Iole—joined by a hunky young Gladiator School dropout named Homer—set off for Alexandria to retrieve Vanity. Thanks to plenty of surreptitious help from the gods and Pandy’s knack with fire, the teens weather all manner of burns, broken bones and bad wounds on the way to a violent climax. The teen banter and behavior that animated the previous adventure seems labored, though, and a poorly conceived encounter with a circus staffed by multicultural stereotypes serves more to pad the page count than lighten the tone. Once Vanity’s under wraps again, the Egyptian god who had been masquerading as the circus’s inscrutable Chinese magician steps in to clean up the mess, and the young folk are off to the Atlas Mountains to collar Laziness. One might argue that they’ve already found it. (glossary) (Fantasy. 11-14)