Note: The title of this book has been translated into English by me for the reading comprehension of this blog's viewers as the book itself isn't available in English (yet). The original title reads Internat der Bösen Tiere #2: Die Falle.
Book two time! Spoilers ahead!
Noël returns in this second installment as he desperately wants to go diving with his fellow human students. However, the headmistress forbids him from going, with the risk of the evil Uko finding him being too big. Noël goes anyways, but this does not turn out to be a wise decision. Will he and his friends be okay?
This was overall a pretty enjoyable read, but I do have a major gripe with it. I'll first get the positives out of the way, though: I liked the interesting setup, I liked learning a bit more about certain characters old and new, and the character arc of Tyson was very well handled. Seeing more of Katókwe is also a plus, she's a really neat character as well. I also still like Nöel himself, of course, but he's not the most interesting character around to me, at least not yet.
Where I do have a gripe, though, is that this story just doesn't feel like it accomplishes much. There isn't a lot of new plot developments, we don't learn a whole lot more about the world or the characters or Uko who wants to kidnap Noël. It's just kinda, well, nothing. The whole plot is basically "Noël gets stuck in a trap by the villains and then gets out". But so little else is accomplished. I was really hoping to dive deeper into the world and the characters and especially the whole deal with Uko, but instead so little is done here.
Book one was a lot of setup with not a lot of payoff as well, but there at least it was somewhat justifiable since it was a first installment and needed to introduce us to this world and these characters. But book two? What even was accomplished here plot, world-building or character-wise? Not too much. It doesn't really do anything to progress the plot, or at least not much.
This was definitely disappointing for me. I don't hate this book or anything, but it just felt like so much more could've been done with it. There are definitely some good elements here like I mentioned above, but some nice character writing and neat concepts do not carry this entire series so far.
I will probably check out book three at some point, but I'm a bit disappointed with book two.
Rating: 3/5
No comments:
Post a Comment