Abigail Owen is taking readers down to Tartarus in the second book in her Crucible series, ‘The Things Gods Break.’

PHOENIX — Welcome to Tartarus, readers… 

And welcome to New York Times bestselling author Abigail Owen’s latest book, The Things Gods Break, the second in her Crucible series. 

RELATED: She’s a cop. Her dad’s a serial killer. What happens next is the plot of this novel.

Every hundred years, the gods play a game using mere mortals as their pieces to decide which among them is the ruler sitting on the throne of Olympus: the Crucible. 

In the first book in the series, The Games Gods Play, readers follow along as Lyra, a young woman cursed to be unlovable, is chosen by Hades, god of the underworld, to be his champion and compete in the Crucible games. His intentions in the games—and with Lyra’s heart—are unknown, but Lyra isn’t a quitter. She’ll fight for her life and win the Crucible for the god of death, whatever it takes.

In book two, readers find Lyra trapped in Tartarus, and The Things Gods Break follows her attempts to escape. Greek gods and goddesses, the titans, time travel, and, of course, the love story between the god of death himself and Lyra. What more could you want? 

Owen’s Crucible series may remind adult readers of a childhood favorite, Percy Jackson, by Rick Riordan. But the series almost didn’t have the Greek gods in it at all.

When Owen was coming up with the idea, she was inspired by her Dominion series and exploring the powers of the goddesses in that series more deeply. But when she came up with the idea for the Crucible games, she decided to set the trials in a world some readers may be familiar with: the Greek gods and goddesses. 

The story, set in modern-day Greece, keeps many aspects of the myths and legends many know intact. But some aspects, like Hades’ relationship with Persephone, are different in the Crucible series. 

“I think that familiarity for a lot of readers and the knowledge of those myths just adds this kind of richness that I think was going to be hard to capture if I tried to transfer that into a different world,” Owen said. 

Building a world with pre-existing myths, legends, gods, and goddesses, though, wasn’t all fun and games. Owen said it could be challenging to hold true to some aspects and break the rules with others, all while thinking of those readers who may not have any background with the original stories. 

“I tried to give all these little winks and nods to the true classicists out there who love the Greek god mythology and really know them well, or even those who continue to worship them today,” Owen said. “I know I’m going off cannon, I know I’m breaking, you know, the world here, go on the ride with me, this is fiction and it’s for fun.”

Owen has written several romantasy series and said she really felt able to pursue her own writing career because of books like Twilight, which showed her that romance and fantasy could be in the same book.

“A lot of traditional fantasy sometimes forgets that love is very vital to how the world works, and to our lives, just in general,” Owen said. 

And you can’t talk about The Things Gods Break without the main character, Lyra. 

“Lyra was, I think, maybe my favorite character I’ve ever written,” Owen said. 

Lyra most closely resembles her as a person, Owen said. But she also bears resemblance to someone very important to Owen: her daughter.

Owen’s daughter has autism, and before she was diagnosed, she suffered from depression. Her daughter’s approach to her depression was sarcasm and dark humor, two things readers see Lyra use as she struggles to come to terms with the curse Zeus placed on her as a baby, to be unlovable. 

“The curse to be unlovable, that was actually, I would say, really tricky to work around, because I would think anybody who’s feeling unloved or unlovable, is a very human space to be in without a curse,” Owen said. “I think all of us have felt that at some point, but to feel it nonstop and have a curse that makes it guaranteed for everybody around you, I think would be a hard space to be in, and it would have been really easy to make a character who was very… a real downer.”

But that’s not what Owen hopes readers take away from Lyra. She hopes they see how she chooses to care and love the people around her anyway, even as she knows they may never feel the same. 

“My daughter, watching her go through that, was where I drew most of the inspiration for that, and because… she was going through a really, really rough time, and to watch her give in to the kind of the darkness, but then pull herself out of it and surge forward,” Owen said. “That’s really where I think Lyra came in from that.”

And Hades, Lyra’s love interest throughout both books, doesn’t come in to save Lyra from her darkness, Owen said. Lyra saves herself, with Hades supporting her along the way. 

“The strongest romances that I’ve witnessed in real life are the people that are true partners,” Owen said. 

One thing The Things Gods Break has that is different from the first book? Time travel.

“Boy, time travel is, it’s a, it’s a mind bender,” Owen said with a laugh.

In writing her previous books, Owen said she has written the story in a linear format. But for The Things Gods Break, Owen said she wrote each portion that had time travel separately, in chronological order, and then sat down to figure out which elements she wanted to be revealed when.

“Putting that in order and then writing all the scenes in between to connect them—wow,” Owen said. “So, that was the biggest challenge by far.”

Another challenge was writing about the titans, because, as Owen found, there is not nearly as much mythology on the titans as there is on other aspects of Greek mythology. 

But her favorite parts were bringing some of the characters met in book one to the page in new ways.

And if you aren’t done with the Crucible just yet, don’t worry: Owen said there’s another book coming. 

While she can’t say much about the upcoming book, Owen told 12News that the book cover is going to be purple and be just as beautiful as the first two books, no doubt.

To keep up with all of Owen’s future projects, connect with her online at her website or on her Instagram.

For more book and literacy stories, check out “Reading Arizona” on YouTube and 12News.com. If you have a story pitch for Reading Arizona, email koconnor@12news.com or reach out via Instagram, @thatjournalistwhoreads.