CORYDON AND THE FALL OF ATLANTIS

Driven by the same agile imagination and lively wit that animated Corydon and the Island of Monsters (2006), this sequel sends goat-footed young Corydon off to Atlantis to rescue his friend, the gentle Minotaur. With a small band that includes the slain Medusa’s enigmatic son Gorgos, the bronze feathered—and sometimes featherbrained—Gorgon sisters Sthenno and Euryale and other “monsters,” Corydon undertakes a long, dangerous journey. He arrives in cultivated, technologically sophisticated Atlantis to find himself enmeshed in a web of plots spun by Hera and other malign Olympians or older deities. Though Druitt has a distracting habit of chivvying the plot along by telescoping or compressing time, so rich is his tale in ingeniously twisted mythology, punctuated by exciting, Odyssey-like encounters (capped, of course, by a truly cataclysmic climax), that readers, particularly fans of Gerald Morris’s Arthurian fantasies, will be riveted from start to finish. The author promises one more episode, set at Troy. (glossary) (Fantasy. 12-15)