I liked this much better than the first one - but then I will never not like stories about creepy, sentient plants. In this volume, Kip gets sent on a rescue mission to the planet Botanicus, where another space scout has disappeared. She's fallen under the influence of said creepy plants, and Kip has to figure out how to rescue both her and himself. How he does it is actually quite clever, and if the ecology here is simplistic in the extreme, it's still a way to get kids thinking about insect pollination and how necessary it is to sustaining a lot of plant life... especially as bee populations around the world are plummeting. A quick, fun read.