Book Review: Simon Thorn and the Viper's Pit by Aimée Carter (Simon Thorn #2)

 

Book two! Let's dive right in! Spoilers ahead.

Simon Thorn is being held at the Animalgam Academy in hopes of keeping him safe. But Simon himself longs to seek out and rescue his mother, who was taken captive by his dangerous grandfather Orion. Simon and his friends leave the Academy behind in hopes of finding her, but the journey is perilous and multiple factions are after him.

Another good installment in this series. I am reading them in German to practice the language, and so far they're a hoot. I initially was unsure if I wanted to finish the series, but I think book two here sold me on at least finishing arc one, maybe even arc two. They're nice, pretty light reads who teach me a German word here or two and have a neat sense of adventure.

This book two is pretty much just as good as book one, maybe even better at some areas. It still has likable characters (I especially love Winter and Ariana), an interesting plot with real stakes and some inventive world-building, even if it's not the most unique out there. I also quite liked that this time we had an actual journey for our characters to go on. I like the setting of Animalgam Academy well enough, don't get me wrong, but it does feel a bit restrictive to only have book one pretty much only take place over there (and a few other areas of New York). But there's a lot of traveling and quite a few different locations in this book. Maybe not as much as I'd have liked (I'd love to see what the Animalgam society in other parts of the country or even world look like), but still enough. I hope future books keep up this traveling trend at least a bit.

My main gripe is still that Orion is pretty underwhelming and standard as a villain. I don't think he's horribly written or anything, but he's just predictable and kind of standard as var as villains in YA/middle grade books go. He doesn't have that much to set him apart from the other type of stereotypical power-hungry villain. Maybe they'll develop him more in future installments, but so far he's pretty bland as far as a main villain goes. 

Still this was an exciting secondary installment, looking forward to the next!

Rating: 4/5