What do you get when a spy agrees to marry an assassin who doesn’t know he’s a spy (then again, he doesn’t know she’s an assassin) so her brother will stop bugging her and he can get his adopted (for a mission) daughter (who happens to be psychic and knows everyone’s secrets) into an elite private school (also for a mission)?

A pretty happy little family, actually.

Volume 2 of Tatsuya Endo’s delightfully absurd Spy X Family (VIZ Media) landed on our porch, and both my daughter and I had read it by the time we went to sleep that night (respectively, though my bedtime isn’t all that much later than hers these days).

Anya has been accepted to Eden Academy! Twilight can finally relax a bit, and Yor won’t have to kill anyone!

Ehhh…

As it turns out, the contact’s son, whom Twilight needs Anya to befriend, is quite the little twit, and she’s forced to put Yor’s training into action. By punching him the in face. And when she tries to apologize, Damien says he’ll never forgive her and flees the room. Meanwhile, a friend of Yor’s happens to run into her brother, to whom he mentions Yor’s marriage, which she’s forgotten to mention.

That’s sort of a big deal, especially considering that – for the sake of Anya’s Eden application – they had the license backdated a year. If Yor’s brother were a normal civil servant, the whole thing might be a funny story one day, but he isn’t so…

This manga continues to be the entire package: an exciting A storyline, a sweet B one, with a dash of “friends to lovers” romance on the horizon for Twilight and Yor. Endo hits exactly the right notes in the relationship between Twilight and Anya. Twilight constantly reminds himself Anya’s part of his mission, but he proves otherwise with his mediations on whether he’s being a good father and listening to Yor when she makes suggestions about how he might better connect with the little girl. We also have the opportunity to see Anya’s relationship with her “mother” develop further in this second volume, and I’m pretty sure no one is ever going to break these two up. I’m sure there will be drama at some point, but no one is going to damage an adorable pink hair on Anya’s head if Yor has anything to say about it. And I pity the fool who tries.

The fact that Endo has chosen to use the pull between work and family, partly to maintain the facade but also because he cares about Yor and Anya, makes Twilight a more interesting character than many of his compatriots. Though he tells himself, at first, that the aquarium trips, shopping expeditions, and dinners out are to convince gossipy neighbors he isn’t a neglectful workaholic (or visiting a mistress), he seems to genuinely enjoy himself. He lets his guard down and allows them to catch glimpses of what the man underneath the persona enjoys and how much he cares about them.

Most thrillers – manga or otherwise – cast the spy as completely stoic until he eventually breaks for the woman. It’s difficult to connect with such characters because they don’t seem human. Twilight, however, is allowed such moments (and they are moments all parents share): overworked exhaustion, homework frustration, and desperation for your child to do one simple thing she can’t seem to manage. The acknowledgment that, even for a master spy who has never failed, parenting is the hardest job in the world, is both hilarious and so very true.

As to Yor’s mysterious, sweet baby brother? I don’t want to give too much away, but the intrigue has certainly ramped up and of course, things can’t possibly end well. But then… it never does, does it?

And of course, there’s more than one villain with which to contend – everyone in the Forger family has a nemesis. It wouldn’t be fair if Twilight had all the fun…