Book I can’t remember details of:
Genre: Fiction/Fantasy (Most likely young adult/teen fiction)
Time Read: 5-7 years ago
May have been a paperback
Plot points: Main character is a boy, found/kidnapped after some tragedy (burning village?).
Kidnappers include a pair of twins? that have some sort of snake/venom/acid power.
They are encountered and defeated by another group of twins, who can control lightning or something like that.
(big time gap missing in memory)
Boy is taken to some sort of fortress/academy/institution and trained to fight, and ride large raptors?/bulls? which he enjoys a lot as he understands/knows a lot about them
He makes a rival out of his roommate or a rival is picked for him from one of the boys at the academy, not sure which. They get in fights (I think?).
There is a spot out in the training field of the academy with two buildings, one of them being a black isolation sort of box where people go in and experience things that terrify them and come out determined not to mess up again.
There is a test at some point where the boy has to travel through a very foggy area with a bunch of dangerous creatures to an old abandoned tower.
To graduate the academy there is a crucible/gauntlet/arena where he has to kill/defeat his teacher.
There is a love interest? who is the princess?(maybe) of a nation of people with beast powers.
In this book world there are people with powers that come from bloodlines and/or animals and/or eye colours and the powers generally stay within the kingdoms they originated from.
There is a character in some part of the book from a royal family that pushed their sibling/infant sibling/ or the heir to some throne from a window causing a severe injury which can be healed by the main character or something like that.
The main character has a power that allows them to view things from long distances, invade people’s minds, see spirits?(maybe), and other things like that.
Main character is maybe/likely an orphan, some part of the book involves a revealing of who exactly his parents (Father specifically) were.
Stump the Bookseller
New format, same book stumper solving.
I can’t help with the specific book but I may be able to narrow it down a bit. I cannot guarantee a direct connection but certain factors in your explanation sound very familiar.
The Dragonlance setting is a fantasy setting (for Dungeons and Dragons), and they release a lot of books to detail the setting and it’s characters, many of which are young adult books.
A constant theme to Dragonlance (series) books is weird kids/young adults kids meeting up, becoming competent, being morally tested, having their destiny revealed, and then fighting a great evil. (which is almost always Takhisis, evil five-headed dragon-god)
Riding monsters (especially jousting with dragons, but other critters too) happens all the time in these books too. There are all kinds of spells too, allowing fireballs and clairvoyance and everything else.
Two of it’s most famous characters are the *twins* Caramon and Raistlin. Caramon is a burly swordsman and Raistlin is a sickly/evil-ish mage who often uses destructive/poison magic.
Now when it comes to narrowing it down further we come to a snag. Caramon and Raistlin were in a *lot* of Dragonlance books (Possibly a hundred of them, most written by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman). And I didn’t read most of them. I don’t know if your book might be the books where Raistlin is young and in the magic academy (Dragonlance Legends, Raistlin Chronicles) when he is tested/tried, or when the next generation (Young Adult Chronicles, others) comes around and those two as adults are escorting somebody’s kid. (There are a about a zillion short stories out there too)
Separately speaking, the part where you mention a kid being pushed out a window sounds like the first Game of Thrones book to me with Bran thrown out of the tower and being paralyzed (and eventually orphaned). The book(series) is complete with lots of siblings, evil (Lannister) twins, weird spy-magic, and separately (sad-background bastard) Jon Snow banished to learn the Night Watch trade and going outside the Wall etc. There is a princess (Daenerys) in a far off rough-and-tumble-land. But the window thing might happen in a bunch of books, and besides nobody in the world would mistake Game of Thrones for a young adult book.