Animorphs - Book Reviews

*** - Excellent
- Good
* - Okay
** - Bad
* - Terrible
+ - Half-star

The Invasion
(The Animorphs series, Book 1)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
***+

DESCRIPTION: Jake used to be an ordinary American kid. His biggest problems were running out of quarters for the video games at the mall and not making the cut for the junior high basketball team. Then he, his best friend Marco, his cousin Rachel and her friend Cassie, and the strange new boy Tobias decided to take a shortcut home from the mall, through the abandoned construction site. That's when they saw the UFO... and when their life as ordinary kids ended.
Prince Elfangor, a centaur-like Andalite, was dying when his battered ship landed. He tells the children that he is not the first alien to come; he fell while fighting the Yeerks. Little more than an outsized slug, a Yeerk crawls into a victim's brain, taking over their bodies and memories and turning their victim into a Controller. Some entire species in the galaxy have succumbed to the parasites. It may be years before more Andalites arrive, and by then it may be too late for Earth. To fight back, Elfangor defies his race's protocols about sharing advanced technology, giving Jake and his friends the Andalite power to morph into any animal they can touch. Morphing proves as much a danger as a strength, and there's much more to it than Elfangor had time to explain before the Yeerks arrived to finish him off, but it's the only tool they have.
Now Jake and his friends are Earth's only defense against the Yeerk invaders, their terrifying alien host-bodies, and their foul leader: the only Andalite-Controller in the galaxy, with his own array of monstrous alien morphs... the abomination known as Visser Three.

REVIEW: This book reads like a pilot episode for a TV series, down to the sometimes-awkward setups and the details that change once the series gets picked up. It starts fairly fast, introducing the characters, establishing the "game rules" for the universe, and giving a taste of the action, paranoia, and occasional humor that form the bulk of the 54-plus book series. Jake finds himself unexpectedly - and unwillingly - thrust into the role of group leader, a job he almost refuses until the Yeerk invasion hits too close to home. With his friends, he has a good support team, even if - like Jake - none of them feel up to the monumental task of saving humanity. Applegate creates some nicely non-humanoid aliens, and if a few of them stretch the laws of physics and nature, well, Animorphs is ultimately an alien-blasting action series. Some fact issues bugged me (such as the "backwards knee" on dogs; as digitigrade walkers, that's the ankle, not the knee, as a quick glance at a dog skeleton amply proves), but on the whole it intrigued me just enough to keep reading... which is just as well, as I originally bought this book because I wanted to read Book 2. (It had a cat on the cover. I never pretended to be a sophisticated book buyer.)
As for the new run (which I've seen on the job at the library shipping center), I have to say that, while I liked the original "morphing image" covers of the originals, the new ones are pretty cool in a shiny-object way. (Hey, I already said I wasn't particularly sophisticated...) What I'm not so sure about is reported attempts to "update" the series with modern pop culture references. First off, it insults the target audience - the very thing Applegate never once did in the entire series run. Secondly, too much updating will destroy things; they'll have to go beyond mere pop culture references to include all the technology that wasn't available in the 1990's - smartphones and GPS and texting and such, not to mention emerging forensic and medical technologies that would make it much more difficult to hide traces of human DNA left after battles - that will ruin the flow of several key stories. (They're also moving so slowly that new readers will plow clear past the "updated" books in a flash; are new fans supposed to just sit around waiting for Scholastic to catch up, with 50-odd books already waiting on the library shelves?) And what next - give Dorothy a GPS to get out of Oz? Add a rap number to Alice in Wonderland? Release a revised Harry Potter series with spells cast by iPhone apps? How little credit do publishing houses give kids, anyway? But, hey, I'm not Scholastic...

You might also enjoy:
Animal-Speak (Ted Andrews, Nonfiction - An extensive look at animals as totems, messengers, and spirit guides)
The Andalite Chronicles (K. A. Applegate, YA Fiction - The tale of Prince Elfangor)
The Hork-Bajir Chronicles (K. A. Applegate, YA Fiction - The battle for the world of the simple Hork-Bajir)
The Ellimist Chronicles (K. A. Applegate, YA Fiction - The story of the Ellimist, occasional otherworldly assistant to the Animorphs)
Visser (K. A. Applegate, YA Fiction - Visser One recounts the early days of the Earth invasion)
Alternamorphs - The First Journey and Alternamorphs 2 - The Next Passage (K. A. Applegate, YA Fiction - Choose-your-own-story adventures in the Animorphs universe)
Strange Happenings (Avi, YA Fiction - Fantasy anthology of transformations)
The Encyclopedia of World Wildlife (Mike and Peggy Briggs, Nonfiction - An overview of Earth's wild animals and their fragile conservation status)
Ender's Game (Orson Scott Card, Fiction - A child prodigy trains at an orbital station to defend Earth from alien invaders)
The X-Files: Fight the Future (Chris Carter, adapted by Elizabeth Hand, Fiction - Two FBI agents investigate alien invaders and a dark conspiracy)
The Tripods: When the Tripods Came (John Christopher, YA Fiction - Two teens witness an alien invasion that strips humans of power on Earth)
Half-Human (Bruce Coville editor, YA Fiction - Fantasy anthology of half-humans)
The Shadow Children sequence (Margaret Peterson Haddix, YA Fiction - A forbidden third child in a totalitarian future becomes part of an underground resistance)
The Leopard's Daughter (Lee Killough, Fiction - In prehistoric Africa, a warrior girl with a leopard's soul seeks acceptance among humans)
The Watchers series (Peter Lerangis, YA Fiction - Stories of children in strange sitations)
Freaks!: How to Draw Fantastic Fantasy Creatures (Steve Miller, YA? Art - Drawing animal/human hybrids and more)
The 2099 series (John Peel, YA Fiction - A computer-dominated future is threatened by conspirators with illegal technology)
The Visitors trilogy (Ron Philbrick, YA Fiction - After a UFO crashes, something strange possesses all the grown-ups of Harley Hills)
The Leviathan trilogy (Scott Westerfield, YA Fiction - An alternate World War I involves advanced walking "Clanker" machines and "Darwinist" fabricated animals)

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The Visitor
(The Animorphs series, Book 2)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
***+

DESCRIPTION: A week ago, Rachel was no different than most of the girls at junior high. Then she and her friends met the dying alien Elfangor, and everything changed... even her. Elfangor, in his final moments, gave the kids the power to morph into animals, a weapon to use against parasitic Yeerk invaders. Now Rachel and her friends are the Animorphs, Earth's only defense in a war that nobody knows about... nobody who doesn't already have an alien slug in their brains, at least.
In hopes of finding the Kandrona, a vital component of the Yeerks' survival in their native form, the kids decide to track Assistant Principal Chapman, whom they know hosts a highly-ranked Yeerk. Rachel used to be close to Chapman's daughter Melissa, and while they've drifted apart, she still feels bad betraying a friend. What starts as an infiltration mission quickly becomes more personal - and more dangerous - than Rachel could ever have imagined.

REVIEW: Again, while The Visitor is a fast-paced, action-oriented story, I never foresaw myself reading the entire Animorphs series when I read it. The kids still struggle to accept the responsibility that's been dropped onto their shoulders, with Marco as the most vocal opponent to risking their lives against impossible odds. In this book, Rachel finds her own reason to fight, much as Jake found his in the first volume. Applegate manages to visualize the world as seen through animal eyes, a gimmick that could've easily misfired in the wrong hands. Like most serial stories, for all the struggle the characters go through and the dangers they face, little has changed by the end, with just enough advancement to crawl into the next adventure. I also thought it tried a little too hard to drive home the emotional toll of the Yeerk invasion.
When I saw that the third book would feature Tobias, the Animorph who found himself trapped in hawk form in the first book, I told myself I'd read just one more. Famous last words...

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The Encounter
(The Animorphs series, Book 3)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
****+

DESCRIPTION: A few weeks ago, five ordinary kids took a shortcut home through an abandoned construction site. They didn't know about aliens. They'd never heard of the parasitic Yeerks, the blade-festooned Hork-Bajir, the giant scavenger-centipede Taxxons, or the deer-centaur Andalites who opposed them. They had no idea Earth was already under attack by the Yeerks, or that the popular civic organization The Sharing was the front for their recruitment forces. And they had no idea that, with a little help from Andalite technology, a person could morph into any animal they can touch: the one weapon the dying Andalite Prince Elfangor was able to give them to defend their homeworld. That gift transformed them from five children to five warriors. The Animorphs.
Now, they are only four kids: Jake, Rachel, Cassie, and Marco. And one red-tailed hawk named Tobias.
Stuck in animal form after their disastrous first mission, Tobias clings to the hope that, when the Andalites return to this sector of the galaxy, they'll have a cure for his condition. In the meantime, he acts as the ultimate spy, harnessing a hawk's vision and flight with a human brain. It was he who first spotted the peculiar ripple in the sky - a ripple caused by a cloaked Yeerk ship, traveling to and from the mountains on a regular schedule. Even as the Animorphs investigate, however, Tobias feels his humanity slipping away. To be in a morph is to share an animal mind, with animal instincts, and the longer he's trapped, the more powerful those instincts become. How long can Tobias the human survive in the brain of a wild hawk?

REVIEW: This was the one that hooked me, taking the story from a simple alien-invasion/paranoia action series to something else altogether. All along, the kids have had to struggle with their animal morphs almost as hard as they've struggled to fight the Yeerks and avoid revealing their identities; Visser Three still thinks he's fighting Andalites escaped from their doomed ship, a delusion the Animorphs happily perpetuate to spare their families the danger. This book brings the struggle with the animal mind to the forefront. Tobias wrestles with his new identity, torn between two seemingly incompatible worlds, that of the compassionate human and that of the predatory hawk. The fight nearly leads to his own death, more than once... and at his own talons. His friends, too, must come to terms with their own feelings on his condition - a fate they all could share if they stay in animal form for too long. The fight against the Yeerks continues, of course, but this installment is really more about the people... and the animals whose minds they're obligated to share. I clipped it for a few forced scenes, and one continuity error that, while minor, bugged me.

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The Message
(The Animorphs series, Book 4)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
****

DESCRIPTION: Cassie never asked for the power to morph, any more than she asked to fight against parasitic alien slugs intent on taking over the human race. As an animal lover, she can't deny that the ability to become any animal - to see the world through their senses, to peer into their inhuman minds - holds a certain fascination. It's the rest of the job - the whole fight against ruthless enemies who would kill or enslave her given half a chance - that scares her. She's no leader, like Jake, nor a warrior at heart, like her friend Rachel. But she knows she wasn't given this gift simply to commune with the beasts; it would be an insult to the memory of Prince Elfangor, who died after giving her and her friends the Andalite technology to morph, to not use it as he'd intended, to defend Earth until more Andalite forces arrive. Unfortunately, nobody knows when that will be...
Lately, Cassie's been having some very strange dreams. A voice seems to be calling to her... a voice that, she realizes, isn't human. When Tobias admits to having had similar dreams, she starts to wonder if it's all in her mind. Then Jake mentions the segment on the news the night before, about a strange piece of metal that washed up on the shore: a piece of the lost Andalite warship. Maybe Cassie and her friends don't have to wait for more Andalites to come; maybe some of them survived, as Elfangor did, only to be trapped in the wreckage under the sea. If so, their time may be running out, for the Animorphs aren't the only ones who watch the news. Certainly some Controllers, Yeerk-infested humans, saw it, too. And if Cassie and Tobias are hearing the dream-messages calling for help, then Visser Three - the only Andalite-Controller in the galaxy - has no doubt heard them as well.

REVIEW: Another action-filled adventure in the life of the Animorphs. Alongside the superficial action, the characters continue to deal with the stresses of fighting an invisible enemy, not to mention the morality shifts required when one is forced into the life of a guerilla warrior. With each book rotating through a different character's point of view, Applegate establishes each member of the team as an individual, with different thoughts and feelings and motivations. Cassie's love of nature and respect for animals causes her to question the ethics of morphing; she doesn't find any easy answers, but she does find acceptance, after a fashion. Fairly fun, and it reads fast, even if it wandered a little close to New Age territory while exploring the minds of dolphins and whales.

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The Predator
(The Animorphs series, Book 5)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
****+

DESCRIPTION: If anyone had asked Marco whether he'd wanted to be part of Earth's only resistance to parasitic alien invaders, he'd have told them no. His life was already in shambles, with his mother drowned in a boating accident and his once-brilliant father a broken shell of a man who barely manages to hold on to a part-time job. But it's hard to say no when a dying alien is offering you the only chance for your species's long-term survival... and when your best friend, like the natural-born leader he is, has already made up his mind. (Also, Cassie and Rachel were there. How could he say no in front of two girls without looking like a total coward?)
Since then, Marco's faced down death more times than he cares to count, living a shadow life that would drive many people insane. He's felt his own body rearrange its bones and organs, growing flippers or fur or even an exoskeleton. Now, he's facing something even more dangerous than the usual Animorphs job. Aximili, Elfangor's younger brother, whom the team rescued from the wreckage fo the Andalite warship, wants to steal a Yeerk spacecraft and go home - hopefully to help speed up reinforcements. A suicide mission, surely... and Marco's last. He knows the battle against the Yeerks is important, but so is his family, or what's left of it. How long can he play the odds and expect to win? Does he want to end up dead or, like Tobias, trapped in an animal body forever? His mother's death nearly killed his father - his own would finish the man. But even as Marco prepares to leave the fight to his friends, the Yeerks are about to make the battle personal. Very, very personal...

REVIEW: With this book, Marco, last and most reluctant of the Animorphs, takes center stage. All along, he's been the holdout, the pessimist, constantly arguing that the fight is just too big for five middle-schoolers to handle, even as he provides much-needed humor with smart-aleck remarks - just the thing to break the tension in the face of impossible odds. His reluctance almost got to be too much. Here, at last, he finds redemption as he reveals just why he's having so much trouble committing to the battle. Ironically, the same reasons that made him reluctant to be an Animorph become the very reasons that draw him back into the fight. We readers also get to see more of Ax, rescued at the end of Book 4. The alien works surprisingly well with the team, being neither too superior nor too stupid; as an Andalite, he obviously knows more about the Yeerks, aliens, and technology in general, but he's also a kid, an untested warrior with no practical battle experience and no clue about how to survive on Earth. The action and danger continues to build as the mytharc grows in new and unexpected directions.

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The Capture
(The Animorphs series, Book 6)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
*****

DESCRIPTION: It seems so long ago, when the lives of Jake and his friends changed so drastically - and so literally. Before then, they had no idea that aliens were real, let alone visiting Earth. They'd never heard of the Andalites and their enemies, the parasitic Yeerks who, even now, were invading the planet in their endless quest for new host species. And they certainly never thought that, thanks to the technological gift of a dying Andalite warrior, they'd be able to transform into animals, their one weapon against the Yeerk invasion. But now, life as an Animorph almost seems normal.
Jake's brother, Tom, has been rising swiftly through the ranks as a Controller (as Yeerk-infested lifeforms are known.) Now, Tom's part of a new scheme to use hospitals as "recruitment" centers. As an Animorph, Jake knows he has to stop them by any means. As a boy, he can't reconcile himself to the cost: if Tom's plan fails, the invasion leader Visser Three won't spare the innocent host body when punishing the Yeerk. Then a scouting mission goes horribly wrong. Suddenly, it's no longer just Tom's life on the line. It's Jake's... because, now, Jake isn't just an Animorph.
He's a Controller.

REVIEW: The whole Animorphs series has the feel of episodic TV. (There was, actually, a short-lived Animorphs TV series on Nickelodeon, but the less said about that, the better...) In that context, The Capture would've been the sweeps-week special. Like the best of the books, Applegate delivers an action-packed story that's not afraid of introspection or emotional growth. Jake's experience as a Controller gives him some surprising insights into the mind of his enemy, not to mention the invasion as a whole. As the Yeerk learns, it's not just the Animorphs the invaders have to worry about on this planet - a theme that's picked up in several later installments. A great installment in a fun thrill-ride of a series.

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The Stranger
(The Animorphs series, Book 7)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
****

DESCRIPTION: Rachel has always been one of the most enthusiastic of the Animorphs, ready to fight from the start. But even as she's dealing out death and destruction to the Yeerks, she's also still a kid, with little sisters and a lawyer mother and a newscaster father who have recently divorced. Now, her dad's moving halfway across the country... and he wants Rachel to come with him.
Even as she struggles with that problem, the Animorphs face another: during their latest attempt to infiltrate the underground Yeerk pool, they find themselves confronted with a brand-new alien. Known as an Ellimist, he can fold space and time like cheap origami paper - and, according to him, the fight to save Earth is already lost. A select few humans might be saved on a distant, safe world beyond the reach of the Yeerks... if the Animorphs agree. Now, everyone wants Rachel to make up her mind.
Leave the city? Leave the fight? Or leave the planet? What's a girl supposed to do... and will she live long enough to make the decision at all?

REVIEW: If this book seems a little weaker than the previous installment, it's because so much is shoehorned into the story. Some very mytharc-pivotal stuff is going on here, from the introduction of the Ellimist to the possibility of the Animorphs' first decisive victory in the war, and the plot has to do some stretching to accommodate it. Rachel, always the strong one, finds herself on the verge of crumbling under the pressure she faces from so many different fronts. Her family matters might seem laughably trivial compared to the fight to save Earth, but to a middle-school-age girl they carry similar weight; it's a credit to Applegate that I, as a reader, was able to understand that she couldn't just "get over it" and focus on the "big" stuff. It all comes together in the end, moving both mytharc and characters forward for the next book.
In rereading the series, I keep finding myself noting how quickly times change. None of the Animorphs own cell phones. In a previous book, Cassie talks about setting the VCR to record a TV show. Even Marco's nickname for Rachel, Xena, probably seems dated to modern middle-schoolers, though it was a prominent pop-culture reference in the late 1990's. (I'd say it makes me feel old, but I was over the target age when I first read these books anyway... and my dad always swiped them as soon as I got through with them.)

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The Andalite's Gift
(The Animorphs series, Megamorphs 1)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
****

DESCRIPTION: Jake, Cassie, Rachel, and Marco - plus Tobias, the boy-turned-hawk, and Ax, the Andalite - have been fighting the invading Yeerks ever since that fateful night when they met the dying Andalite, Prince Elfangor, in the abandoned construction site. Given the alien technology to morph into animals, they've struck some serious blows to the invading parasites and caused major troubles for the leader of the invasion, the foul Visser Three. But they're also still human kids, and even superheroes need a weekend off once in a while. With Rachel on her way to a gymnastics camp and Cassie and Jake going to a pool party, they figured they'd leave off the fight for humanity's freedom for a couple days and take some time to just be normal kids.
They figured wrong.
When Rachel goes missing and a new threat appears - an unnatural whirlwind of dust that can form itself into a hideous alien killing machine - the Animorphs realize that their R-&-R will have to wait for a while. The Yeerks have just unleashed a new terror to combat the "Andalite bandits" who have been harrying their invasion efforts. But how can they fight a dustcloud that chews up houses and trees like a living woodchipper... a cloud that can follow them anywhere, through any morph?

REVIEW: The Megamorphs books are "super-edition" installments - the TV movie specials of the series run, so to speak - rotating through multiple character POVs. It works, more or less, telling a longer and somewhat more intense story than the usual Animorphs book. The amnesia storyline with Rachel felt more like a worn plot-extending chestnut than a genuine plot twist, and Ax's chapters also leaned a little heavily on Earth-based terminology for a supposedly alien character, but for the most part it's on par with the bulk of the series.

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The Alien
(The Animorphs series, Book 8)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
***+

DESCRIPTION: Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill should never have been on the Andalite Dome ship that came to Earth. As an underaged aristh, a warrior-cadet, he had no place among the full-fledged warriors and princes of his people. But with Prince Elfangor, the great hero, as his older brother, certain exceptions tended to be made. Even then, nobody expected an exceptionally fierce battle... just as nobody expected the Blade ship the Yeerks had hidden on the Earth's moon, the ship that turned the tide against the Andalites. Only when he was rescued from the wreckage on the ocean floor by four humans did he learn the full devastation of the battle... that he was the last free Andalite alive on Earth, that his brother had been killed by the foul Andalite-Controller Visser Three.
And that, in his last moments, the hero Prince Elfangor had broken the greatest law of the Andalite race by giving five human children the technology to morph.
As days turn to weeks, Aximili joins the Animorphs in thier battle against the Yeerk invasion, but he is not one of them. He can never be one of them, never be a true and full companion to these primitive aliens. To share information about his people and their technology would only further compound Elfangor's crime. Besides, as trusting as the Animorphs are now, how could they continue to be his friends if they were to learn the reason for the very law Elfangor broke - the secret shame of the Andalites that drives them to hunt the Yeerks across the galaxy?

REVIEW: Ax the alien finally gets his book-length debut, telling the story from his point of view. As with his chapters in the first Megamorphs book, his narrative leans a bit heavily on Earth-based terminology. The humor of Ax's near-complete inability to function in human morph also grows a bit stale; I understand that he's still a kid, but he's also supposed to be reasonably intelligent. Those issues aside, Ax finally has to confront his conflicting loyalties and decide which master - which world - he ultimately serves. He has an understandably difficult time with this, worsened when he discovers a means of communicating with his homeworld. Overall, while not a stellar installment in the franchise, it's still reasonably entertaining, and Applegate manages to explain some cultural and physical anomolies of the Andalite people.
I also have to say that the original artistic interpretation of the Andalite here doesn't quite match the descriptions given in the book.

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The Secret
(The Animorphs series, Book 9)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
****+

DESCRIPTION: The Animorphs hurt the Yeerks bad when they destroyed the Earth-based Kandrona, but the war isn't over yet. Visser Three still thinks he's fighting Andalite bandits, and he knows Andalites need a place to feed and hide while in their native form. A place like the national forest... where Aximili, the only Andalite of the group, lives. Under the guise of a logging company, the Yeerks mean to hunt down the bandits or destroy their sanctuary trying.
As the Animorphs scramble to stop the plan, Cassie finds herself facing a crisis. For years, she's been an animal lover, a defender of the environment. Being up close and personal with the world as seen through animal eyes has given her a whole new perspective on the natural world, where the primary rule of survival isn't love thy neighbor. It's kill or be killed.

REVIEW: Once more, the series turns its eye on the natural world as a source of conflict, rather than just the alien invaders. Cassie has to come to terms with the harsh reality of Nature and her place as both human being and soldier. Applegate doesn't foist off easy answers on her, because there are none. In some ways, this is the tale of a girl growing up, forced to leave behind the simple ideals of childhood as she discovers just how complicated the world really is. One of the stronger books thus far, in part because it doesn't shy away from thorny morality issues.

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The Android
(The Animorphs series, Book 10)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
*****

DESCRIPTION: Marco used to be the most reluctant of the Animorphs... that is, until the Yeerks gave him a very good reason to fight. His mother, supposedly drowned in a boating accident, is the host of Visser One, instigator of the invasion that is now under the command of Visser Three. He knows he may never get his mom back, but he also knows that the Yeerks will pay for what they've done to his family... even if it costs him his own life.
While in morph, Marco discovers something very strange about an old friend, Erek - a friend who is now handing out flyers for the Yeerk front organization The Sharing. As he and the Animorphs investigate, they discover a secret older than the pyramids... and face a choice that could change the course of the war.

REVIEW: Human drama, difficult choices, new morphs, new secrets, danger, plenty of action and a nice dose of humor... The Android represents the Animorphs series at its finest. Wisecracking Marco deals with some very heavy problems, especially when the Yeerks make a play for his father. Applegate introduces the Chee, the alien android race living in hiding on Earth, who are not only an intriguing addition to the Animorphs universe but prove very useful in later installments. The whole combination just clicks here. The only real drawback is the spider morph on the cover, but I'm not (quite) arachnophobic enough to let that affect the rating.

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The Forgotten
(The Animorphs series, Book 11)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
****+

DESCRIPTION: Since that first night, back in the abandoned construction site, Jake has been the unofficial leader of the Animorphs team. It wasn't something he ever asked for, or even wanted, but somehow everyone looked to him for answers, for decisions, for battle plans. So now he's the head of the only morph-capable humans on Earth, the only ones who know of the Yeerk invasion. Even the young Andalite warrior-cadet Ax looks to him for decisions. Why can't they see that he's not a leader, that he's just as scared and insecure as any middle-school-aged boy faced with impossible choices? It's to drive a boy crazy... and maybe it has.
All day, Jake has been having hallucinations. Strange, hyper-realistic hallucinations of a green world full of danger and death. Then Tobias relays a message: something's happened downtown that has the high-level Controllers in a frenzy to cover it up. Guards, machine guns, even Hork-Bajir... whatever's gone wrong, it's something big. Something that could really hurt the Yeerks. Do the Animorphs go in to investigate, or do they stay back? Everyone's waiting on Jake's word - but how is Jake supposed to be a leader when he can't even keep hold of his sanity?

REVIEW: Applegate flirts with trouble by bringing in the sci-fi chestnut of time travel, but manages to skirt the line... admittedly by using high-level action and the dangerous wonders of the Amazon as distractions. But I was willing to let myself be distracted. Though the serial format of the series (mostly) ensures major characters passage through a given adventure, they do so by the skins of their teeth, with enough problems and setbacks and doubts along the way to still make for an exciting read. While not quite the triumph that The Android was, The Forgotten's still a strong chapter in a remarkable series.

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The Reaction
(The Animorphs series, Book 12)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
***+

DESCRIPTION: Rachel's never been one to hesitate when something needs doing. When she's on a class trip to The Gardens and sees the young boy fall into the crocodile exhibit, she jumps right in to save him. But when she acquires a crocodile's DNA as part of her impromptu rescue plan, something doesn't feel right. Nevertheless, she manages to make it out without being spotted, so even though Jake's angry, it's no big deal.
The Animorphs have just learned that the popular teen actor Jeremy Jason McCole is being recruited to promote The Sharing, the civic organization that's a front for the Yeerks. Rachel and Cassie, like most every girl between the ages of ten and twenty in the country, know from personal experience just how much influence he has - if he says jump, millions of potential hosts won't bother asking how high before throwing themselves into a Yeerk pool. As luck would have it, McCole's coming to town to kick off the promotion... but even as the Animorphs plan to crash the party, Rachel finds herself morphing out of control. The Andalite technology that gives her the power to morph seems to be going haywire - and the very ability that lets her fight just might get the entire group killed.

REVIEW: Applegate sure knows her target audience, the power of celebrity crushes, and fandom in general: PR tactics like this would've handed Earth to the Yeerks on a silver platter. The story itself just doesn't hold together as well as previous books, unfortunately, drifting close to goofiness at the climax. I almost wonder if this wasn't the effort of an early ghostwriter. But it's still readable.

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The Change
(The Animorphs series, Book 13)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
****

DESCRIPTION: Tobias has come to terms with his new life... mostly. Trapped in the body of a red-tailed hawk, he finds himself living in two worlds. In one, he is an Animorph like his friends, helping to fight the invading Yeerks, a human boy who happens to have wings and feathers and laser-sharp vision. In the other, however, he's a hunter, a bird of prey who feeds on mice and sleeps in a tree. In neither world does he feel entirely comfortable; a hawk's life is a hard one for the once-gentle boy he used to be, and he doesn't consider himself much of an Animorph anymore since he's stuck forever in an animal body. But he has no choice in the matter. It's not like he can ever be human again.
While spying on Controllers, Tobias suddenly finds himself watching the impossible: a pair of Hork-Bajir escape into the woods. They are the only free members of their species in the galaxy, and the Yeerks are pulling out all the stops to recapture the refugees. Forces greater than he can understand seem to want Tobias to help the pair. If he succeeds, those forces might grant the wish he's been too afraid to voice, the wish that he thought had died when he passed the fateful two-hour limit in hawk morph: the wish to be human once more.

REVIEW: Another plot-pivotal episode in the series, it maintains the action-heavy pace while allowing for the occasional introspective break. Tobias has to admit that he hasn't reconciled himself to his strange new life as fully as he thought he had... just as he has to admit that, even if he regains his human form, he can never be the boy he used to be. By the end, a few new wrinkles have been added to the mytharc.
After this book, in the original release, came The Andalite Chronicles (reviewed via a link below), the first of four extra books that delve into the backstory of the Animorphs universe. While not necessary, I'd recommend reading them in the order in which they were originally released; some elements in the Chronicles books constitute spoilers - or might not make sense - if you haven't "caught up" to where the series stood at the time of publication.

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The Unknown
(The Animorphs series, Book 14)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
****+

DESCRIPTION: Cassie may be part of the Animorphs, secretly fighting the hidden Yeerk invasion with the Andalite power to morph animals, but she also has other responsibilities, namely helping her father run the Wildlife Rehabilitation Center in the family barn. When Crazy Helen, an eccentric woman in the remote Dry Lands, calls about a sick horse, Cassie and her father - and Rachel, who happened to be visiting - drive out to help. They find a staggering and snake-bitten horse, barely able to stand up. But, just as it collapses, the girls see something very disturbing: a large slug crawling from the horse's ear. A Yeerk.
The other Animorphs don't really believe them. Why would a Yeerk make a Controller out of a horse? It just doesn't make sense. Even the blast that destroyed the horse's body could've been old army munitions, and not the Dracon beams Cassie and Rachel swore they heard. But in the middle of the Dry Lands is the top-secret military base Zone 91, where fringe elements claim that the government's been keeping alien technology hidden for decades. Of course, only people like Crazy Helen believe the rumors; there's nothing alien about the operations at Zone 91... or is there?

REVIEW: The series has settled into a nice pattern by now, with bursts of action and humor amid incremental progress in the overall war. Not so profound or serious as some of the best books, it nevertheless entertains. As a former X-Phile, I especially enjoyed the Animorphs' thinly-veiled take on that favorite target of conspiracy theorists, Area 51 and its ilk. It earned an extra half-star for the real secret hidden at the base, one that would've made for an absolutely priceless "moment" for Agents Mulder and Scully.

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The Escape
(The Animorphs series, Book 15)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
****

DESCRIPTION: When Erek approached the Animorphs with news of a secret underwater Yeerk project, it should've been just another mission. But Visser One has returned to Earth to oversee it - Visser One, the Yeerk infesting the brain of Marco's mother, a fact he's witheld from everyone except Jake. He insists he's fine, but inside Marco is falling apart. Part of him knows that his mother is as good as gone, that once the Yeerks enslave a host it's until death, while another part fantasizes about saving her from the prison of her own brain. If ever the Animorphs go into battle against her...
But this is just an investigation, a quick peek to figure out what the Yeerks are up to. With luck, Marco won't even see his mother. But since when has luck been on his side?

REVIEW: Another "holding pattern" book, mostly notable for introducing a new alien species (the Leeran, who will figure into at least one later book) and sending Marco through the wringer again over his mother's predicament and his own inability to help her. While little enough new ground was covered, the action kept things clicking along... and, heck, as a pseudowriter I can understand the desire to draw out a character's suffering for maximum dramatic effect (not to mention page count.)

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The Warning
(The Animorphs series, Book 16)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
*****

DESCRIPTION: Ever since their fateful encouner with Prince Elfangor in the abandoned construction site, when they learned of the Yeerk invasion, Jake and his friends bore the terrible truth alone. Who could they turn to, when anybody might have an alien parasite wrapped around their brains? Who could they trust except each other? Who else would ever believe that the Earth was under attack?
Now, they've found something they never expected: proof that someone else knows about the Yeerks, on a website dedicated to exposing the invasion.
Jake doesn't know whether to be relieved or terrified. While he can't help suspecting a trap, part of him longs for someone else to turn to, someone else to take the reins of Earth's pitiful resistance. But first they have to find the person behind the website, and if they're friend or foe.

REVIEW: Never short on action, this book returns to the emotional resonance and internal conflicts that raise the series above the average sci-fi serial. Jake makes some serious mistakes, both in battle tactics and in handling his own crew, as he's forced to quash his own reluctance beneath the mantle of leadership. A new foe is introduced, and though less ultimately comes of this enemy than one might expect, it still adds a new dimension to the battle. Having read the whole series, I can see some foreshadowing of events to come here. (I also see more evidence of how fast technology's progressed; Marco's 56k dial-up modem was considered top-of-the-line when this book originally appeared in 1998.)

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The Underground
(The Animorphs series, Book 17)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
****+

DESCRIPTION: When the Animorphs saw the man leaping from the high-rise, they thought he was just depressed, or insane. But when Rachel's lawyer mother gets hired by his family to formalize his commitment to an asylum, she hears that his delusions involve an alien that lives in his brain... a Yeerk.
It turns out that their enemies have a new weakness - they can become addicted to instant maple-and-ginger oatmeal. Only the addiction drives them insane, even as it eliminates their need to leave their host to feed on Kandrona rays at the Yeerk pool every three days. If someone were to sneak some oatmeal into the food supplies at the pool, it would seriously cripple the invasion... but at a high cost to the hosts, who would be left with a gibbering slug wrapped around their brains for the rest of their lives. It would also mean another trip to the underground Yeerk pool, a place so terrifying that Rachel still has nightmares about it. But what kind of warrior would she be if she gave in to her own fear?

REVIEW: Once again, the Animorphs find themselves entangled in the thorny, shifting moralities of war, a foe every bit as devious and daunting as the fight against the Yeerks themselves. Rachel's ruthlessness clashes with her friends' reservations about exploiting their enemy's weakness, a ruthlessness fueled in part by her own attempts to overcome fear by pretending she doesn't feel it. How far will she really go to ensure victory, or to save her friends? Rachel has to find out the hard way here, in her equivalent of Jake's crisis in the previous book.

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The Decision
(The Animorphs series, Book 18)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
****+

DESCRIPTION: Aximili's been stranded on Earth for months, but though he has a fight and a purpose, he doesn't have a home. Even among his friends, the Animorphs, he is an outsider, an alien, on a world where he doesn't belong. But he must force himself to accept the truth: until the Yeerks are gone, or until another Andalite warship comes, he'll never be among his own people. Or so he thinks.
While in mosquito morph, Ax and the Animorphs find themselves suddenly in Zero-Space, the nondimension where extra mass goes during small morphs... and where faster-than-light travel is possible. They've been caught in the wake of an Andalite warship. Ax is thrilled to be back among his own species. But the ship is on its way to Leera, to fight the Yeerks. It cannot detour to Earth to return the human Animorphs. And something is about to go very wrong with his own homecoming... something that makes Aximili decide once and for all who his people truly are.

REVIEW: Ax's books tend to be weaker than the rest. This one earned extra marks for moving the battle beyond Earth, a reminder that, even as the Animorphs fight Visser Three, an entire galaxy is at war, pitting entire species against each other. That war, as Ax learns the hard way, isn't going well for the Andalites, in no small part due to his species' ongoing refusal to work closely with its allies... not to mention a growing number of traitors in their own ranks. In his previous book (The Alien), Ax claimed to put his faith in "Prince" Jake above the Andalite superiors he temporarily contacted, but coming face-to-face with his own kind puts that loyalty to the test. On top of his inner struggles, he and the Animorphs find themselves pitched headlong into a war on alien soil. A high-action romp across Z-space, continuing a good streak in the series.

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In the Time of the Dinosaurs
(The Animorphs series, Megamorphs 2)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
****

DESCRIPTION: The Animorphs never should've been there. It was a human crisis - a downed nuclear submarine - with no ties to the Yeerk invasion. But it's hard to have a power like morphing and not use it to help when needed. How were they supposed to know that one of the warheads had been damaged? How could they have anticipated it exploding... and how could they have predicted what would happen when they were hit by the shockwave?
They couldn't have known. Never in a million years... or, to be more precise, sixty-five million years.
Some combination of the nuclear blast and being in morph opened what the Andalites call a Sario Rip: a hole in time. The Animorphs find themselves stranded in the late Cretaceous Age, facing some of the most dangerous predators ever to walk the Earth. But they aren't the only strangers to this prehistoric land... and Tyrannosaurus Rex may be the least of their worries.

REVIEW: It's a little hard to read this without thinking about how much has changed about dinosaur theory since this book was written. Everything from the appearance of dinosaurs to the ultimate cause of extinction has been turned on its head in the past few years. It's also notably unlikely that, given the spotty nature of fossil records and the fact that we know next to nothing about the external appearances of most dinosaurs, the Animorphs consistently encounter creatures they can readily identify on sight from childhood toys, library books, and movies. Those troubles aside, this volume feels slightly less contrived than the first Megamorphs, even if dinos are a blatant marketing tactic. It maintains the character dynamics, conflicts, and action level that the series is known for. And, marketing tactic or not, dinosaurs are cool... cool enough to rate a solid Good, despite some plausibility issues.

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The Departure
(The Animorphs series, Book 19)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
****+

DESCRIPTION: Cassie has always been the heart of the Animorphs, the moral compass that kept them from straying over the line from defenders of freedom to cold-blooded killers. But she no longer knows where that line is. Once a well of compassion, she has lost herself in the pitiless minds of predators. Once a pacifist, she has followed her friends into ruthless battle. Once a lover of Nature's harmony, she has seen the constant struggle for survival that is the animal world. Everything seems to be going gray and dead inside. Cassie cannot seem to care about anything anymore. She doesn't want to - she can't - live like this.
So she walks away. From the battle. From her friends. From the fight against the Yeerks.
But walking away doesn't undo the changes that months of battle have wrought. The emptiness stays with her. Even her hopes of burying herself in work at the family wildlife clinic are dashed when she learns that their corporate sponsor has pulled funding. Then she finds herself lost in the wilderness... lost, but not alone. With her is the young girl Karen - a girl who knows more than she should about Cassie, about war, about the Yeerks and the Andalites.
Karen is a human-Controller. She knows who - and what - Cassie is. And Cassie finds her wavering convictions put to their ultimate test.

REVIEW: Having seen the mighy Andalite image tarnished so severely in Book 18, and how peacable Cassie lost herself so completely in the mind of a Tyrannosaurs Rex in Megamorphs 2, this culminates a character transformation that epitomizes the series' strongest suit: its willingness to address the gray areas that other series (young adult and grown-up alike) often gloss over. Not every Andalite is Prince Elfangor, but not every Yeerk is Visser Three... and even in the midst of all-out war, there can be a time and a place - even a need - to recognize that the enemy may not always be who (or what) they appear to be. This book is less about the fighting and more about the complex issues of the Yeerk war. It loses a half-star for a bit of a logic hiccup at the end, and the fact that the escaped leopard subplot wasn't strictly necessary; a mountain lion or other native predator would've filled its role nicely. Overall, a beautiful tale.

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The Discovery
(The Animorphs series, Book 20)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
****

DESCRIPTION: Since becoming an Animorph, school has become the less-stressful part of Marco's life... or, rather, the place where stress comes from ordinary things, like pop quizzes and girls and lunchroom bullies, instead of alien parasites and watching his own body melt and distort into animal form. But then he sees a new kid on campus with something very, very strange in his backpack. Strange, yet all too familiar. It's the blue cube that Prince Elfangor used to create the Animorphs, transferring the Andalite morphing technology to five human kids. They had thought that it was destroyed when the Yeerk Dracon beams reduced the dead prince's spaceship to molecular dust. Apparently not.
Then Erek the Chee brings grim news: a top-secret world summit meeting is coming to the area, placing six world leaders within the Yeerk's grasp. Only one of them's already a Controller... but Erek doesn't know who. Just one more helping of stress atop Marco's already-overfull plate.
As the Animorphs race to secure the blue cube before their mission to the summit meeting, the boy David - oblivious to what he's found - posts an ad online offering the "strange box" he found for sale. With the Yeerks closing in, the Animorphs have two choices: steal the box and abandon the boy to his fate, or use its power as Elfangor did to add David to the team. With time running out and the biggest mission they've ever faced closing in on them, they don't have much time to decide...

REVIEW: This begins the David trilogy, one of the great moments of the series as a whole. The first book struggles a bit under the extra load of establishing a new character and setting up a large-scale mission. It also ends on a cliffhanger. The Animorphs' early read off David is mixed, to say the least: he's a loner who keeps a cobra for a pet and doesn't respond well to authority, but beneath it all he seems to be just as scared and lost as any of them were that first fateful night in the construction site. While Marco can sympathize with his position, somewhere deep down he senses the trouble that's to come... but, considering his own early issues with being an Animorph, he doesn't feel right voicing those misgivings, especially when the others seem almost relieved to have an extra pair of morph-capable hands available going into their most dangerous mission to date. If he'd stuck to his guns, perhaps things would've gone differently... but that's for Book 21.
As a closing note, this book starts the advertizing blitz for the short-lived Animorphs TV series on Nickelodeon (from 1998.) While it featured impressive CGI morphing effects, it short-changed the aliens - even the plot-pivotal Andalites - and the scripts dumbed down and glossed over the best parts of the books. (They also kept bumping the air times without notice or reason.) I still keep expecting a reboot, if not a film franchise... preferably all-animated. The guts for a good show are right there on the page, if someone could manage it.

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The Threat
(The Animorphs series, Book 21)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
*****

DESCRIPTION: Six have become seven. Adding David to the team, giving him the ability to morph, was as much an act of desperation as a leap of faith. With the Yeerks threatening to infest the heads of six major world nations at a nearby international summit, they need all the help they can get... and, with his parents taken and Visser Three hunting him down for the blue Andalite box, David had nowhere else to go. If only Jake could be sure it was the right thing to do...
David may be an Animorph now, but he's still an enigma. A not entirely welcome enigma, either. He second-guesses orders, acts on his own, and even uses morphs to break the law when left to his own devices. Jake even gets the uneasy feeling that David thinks he ought to be the new leader of the team. Maybe it's just the impossible stress he's been under. Maybe it's just a phase. Maybe it's Jake's imagination. Or maybe David will be the greatest mistake the Animorphs have ever made...

REVIEW: Jake takes up the tale of David in the middle book of the trilogy, as the newest Animorph shows his ugly true colors. His job as leader of the team has never been easy, but dealing with a traitor in their ranks - a traitor who wouldn't even be among them had he not been willing to give David a chance - twists in his gut like no decision he has made to date. And, of course, their goal of stopping the Yeerks from infesting major world leaders only gets harder by the minute. It all sets up a humdinger of a finale in Book 22.

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The Solution
(The Animorphs series, Book 22)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
*****

DESCRIPTION: They thought they were doing the right thing. They thought they were giving a scared, lost boy a chance to fight back. They took a leap of faith... and were betrayed. David, the newest Animorph, turned on the very hands that tried to help him. Now, with Tobias gone and Jake bleeding to death after a run-in with David's lion morph, Rachel snaps. She's already lost her normal life to the Yeerk war. If this snot-nosed, arrogant punk thinks he can take away her friends, her comrades-in-arms... he'll pay in blood. But there's one problem with her plans for vengeance. Visser Three, with powerful alien technology and hordes of Controllers at his disposal, has spent months hunting for the Animorphs without success. How are five kids going to stop someone with their own power to morph - someone who, unlike them, isn't afraid to kill?

REVIEW: The David trilogy wraps up with Rachel's tale. Even as the hate boils up inside her, she finds herself standing back and seeing just what the war has done to her, the girl whose greatest thrill in life used to be a perfect gymnastics routine or a weekend sale at The Gap... and what the war has done to her friends. None of them are the people they used to be, and it's unlikely they'll ever go back to their old selves. A subplot about a critically-injured relative throws these changes into stark relief, as the cousins Jake and Rachel find themselves surrounded by "normal" people reacting to tragedy in a normal way. In light of the series finale, there's some very strong foreshadowing here of the lives that await them when the battle's done. Despite her own horror at the thoughts she's capable of, Rachel has to make peace with herself. With David, however, no peace or compromise is possible. I've always considered the David trilogy to be the highlight of the series, and rereading it hasn't diminished my opinion.
After this book, in the original run, came The Hork-Bajir Chronicles (reviewed via a link below); again, while it's not necessary to do so, I'd strongly suggest reading the books in the order of their original release, for continuity reasons.

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The Pretender
(The Animorphs series, Book 23)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
****

DESCRIPTION: When Tobias became trapped in a red-tailed hawk morph, nobody seemed to notice. His father dead, his mother vanished, Tobias had been bounced back and forth between indifferent relatives who hardly cared about him when he was around. That's part of the reason why, when the Ellimist restored his ability to morph, Tobias remained a hawk; even though he could morph to his old body, regaining his humanity at the cost of his wings, he had nowhere to go, nobody who wanted him.
Now someone's been asking about him at school. Some woman named Aria claims to be his cousin, and a lawyer says he has documents pertaining to Tobias's real father... who may not be the man he thought he was. This comes just as his life in the wild takes a turn for the worse, with a rival red-tail encroaching on his meadow and prey growing scarce. Tobias loves his wings, and doesn't want to sacrifice his ability to morph, to help fight the Yeerks, but somewhere deep inside his human self he yearns for a family he never had. Risk death and starvation as a hawk, or risk his heart as a human - which will Tobias choose?

REVIEW: This book seems to mostly be an excuse to relate information to Tobias that readers learned in The Andalite Chronicles, concerning his unusual parentage. It starts a downslope in the series, with some elements feeling forced: his sudden, crippling empathy for his prey, for instance, reads like a plot device, not a natural outgrowth of the character. Still, Tobias has always been a tragic character, the first casualty of the Yeerk war, so seeing him forced to suffer again isn't entirely unexpected. On the whole, it's fun enough, but not quite at the level of the previous books. (Then again, the David trilogy's a hard act to follow.)

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The Suspicion
(The Animorphs series, Book 24)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
***

DESCRIPTION: When Cassie saw the tiny spaceship stuck to the old water pump, she didn't know what to think of it. The pump was where she'd hidden the Andalite blue box, but surely nobody could know it was there - and a ship the size of a child's toy could hardly be a threat, anyway. But the Helmacrons, petty-minded beings bent on galactic conquest, have a few tricks up their little sleeves. For one thing, their ships can detect the "transformational energy" of a person in morph. For another, their shrink rays pack quite a whallop. Cassie, Marco, and Tobias learn that the hard way. But being reduced to the size of an insect doesn't excuse one from stopping alien invaders, be they parasitic Yeerks or pint-sized Helmacrons.

REVIEW: Here, the series hits what can properly be termed a "lull." This book reads like a filler episode, full of superficial silliness and Mexican standoffs and half-funny jokes. Cassie's usually the introspective one, searching for the moral options, but here she's just another Animorph, caught up in a goofy misadventure that doesn't advance the mytharc or the characters in any significant fashion. While nothing outright embarrassing happens here, nothing particularly great does, either.

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The Extreme
(The Animorphs series, Book 25)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
***+

DESCRIPTION: Marco thought his week was going bad when he totally blew a date with Marian, one of the cutest girls in school. (But, really, a Beethoven concert? How was he supposed to stay awake?) Then Erek the Chee turned up with bad news: the Yeerks are working on a way to remote-beam Kandrona rays via satellite relays. If they can pull it off, then their greatest weakness - the need to leave their hosts every three days to visit the underground Yeerk pool - will be history. The Animorphs have to crash that party... only Erek doesn't know where it is, or what defenses the Yeerks have waiting for them. All they know it's somewhere remote... very remote, where alien ships won't be noticed.
Which explains how the Animorphs find themselves on the ice-blasted shores of the Arctic Ocean. It doesn't explain how they're supposed to survive, when the weather alone is nearly as deadly as their alien enemies...

REVIEW: Not quite as silly and pointless as Book 24, it nevertheless continues an aimless coast in the series. Like the previous book, it's more about the "wow" gimmick - in this case, the "field trip" to the Arctic Circle - than about character growth, or even the fight against the Yeerks. I've heard rumors that ghostwriters were responsible for a good chunk of the series, especially this middle stretch; that might explain the autopilot overtones, but it's not really an excuse, as I'm sure there are decent ghostwriters out there who could've managed to pep up even a canned plot like this one. Still, it's not outright embarrassing, even if there's a slight continuity hiccup.
On an unrelated note, this book features an ad for the late, lamented Watchers series by Peter Lerangis (reviewed via a link below), which was axed by Scholastic after six books and never had a chance to develop as it should have. There's a certain irony in its appearance in a book that's essentially series-padding.

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The Attack
(The Animorphs series, Book 26)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
****+

DESCRIPTION: Jake and his friends thought they had enough on their plates, fighting the Yeerk invasions and the devious Visser Three. Then, the Ellimist returned. Capable of folding space and time on a whim, his seemingly omnipotent powers bound by rules no human mind can comprehend, he has helped in the past... but never as expected. Now, they learn that the Ellimist has an enemy, the entity known as the Crayak. The entire war with the Yeerks, it seems, is but a small skirmish in the eons-long, galaxy-wide conflict between two forces so powerful that open conflict would tear the space-time continuum itself apart. Thus, their habit of fighting through proxies: whole species, like the Yeerks, or even individuals, like the Animorphs. The Ellimist needs seven champions to fight against soldiers of the Crayak, to determine the fate of an entire alien species light-centuries removed from the Yeerks. On his side will stand the five human Animorphs, Aximili the Andalite, and Erek the Chee. The Crayak sends seven members of a species whose names the Animorphs already know, the species that slaughtered the Chee's creators: the Howlers. Winning will hurt the Crayak, and (it is implied) the Yeerks. Lose, and the Animorphs will never have existed...

REVIEW: This brings the series back up to (nearly) its top level. Jake finds himself risking his life and the lives of his friends for aliens who utterly repulse him, fighting an enemy that has never lost a battle in thousands upon thousands of years, and all on the vague promise of the Ellimist that a victory will, somehow, help weaken, if not defeat, the Yeerks. He also must deal with Erek, whose programming prevents him from harming even the murderous Howlers, and Ax, whose momentary breakdown in bravery leads to reckless behavior. Jake resents being treated like a piece on the Ellimist's and Crayak's gameboard, but all he can hope to do is avoid becoming a sacrificial pawn. A small yet glaring error - confusing falcon talons for fingers during a morph - hints that this might be a ghostwriter's work, but it's far closer to Applegate's standard than the last two installments.
On an unrelated note, my first-run version of this book features a large cover sticker proclaiming the "new" timeslot of the Animorphs TV series. I remember it airing all of two times at the advertized time; I gave up chasing it around Nickelodeon's schedule after that.

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The Exposed
(The Animorphs series, Book 27)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
****

DESCRIPTION: Becoming an Animorph meant sacrificing normality, risking life and limb in a fight against nearly-impossible odds, knowing that talking to anyone - a cop, a friend, even her own mother or father - about what she did would land her in a loony bin or - worse - in the Yeerk pool, with an alien slug wrapped around her brain. But, terrible as war is, Rachel still feels a thrill of excitement when she rips into an enemy with the claws of a grizzly bear, or tramples them under an elephant's feet. Sometimes, she's so into the battle that she scares her fellow Animorphs.
She scares herself, too.
Much as Rachel tries to fight it, something deep within her longs for blood and danger. But even that part of her quails at the latest challenge. Something has gone wrong with their allies, the Chee. The holograms that enable the alien androids to pass as human are on the blink, as is their ability to move. Soon, they'll be immobile and utterly exposed... and if the Yeerks got their hands on the advanced Pemalite technology within the Chee, there would be no stopping them, on Earth or elsewhere in the galaxy. But the Pemalite ship that regulates the Chee lies hidden three miles beneath the ocean, down where the water pressure would destroy every animal in the Animorphs' DNA arsenal. And one thing that Rachel has always feared is crushing, smothering darkness...

REVIEW: Had this not come right on the heels of the previous book, it probably would've earned an extra half-star. The series returns to its strong suits, as Rachel wrestles with her changing life and the black monster within. But they just worked with Erek the Chee in the previous installment; that, plus another plot twist (which might constitute a spoiler, so I won't go into specifics here) feel like too much of a similar note struck too close together. That problem aside, it's a fairly good entry in a series that, more often than not, rose well above average.

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The Experiment
(The Animorphs series, Book 28)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
***+

DESCRIPTION: Aximili has learned much about humans since becoming stranded on Earth, but much about their behavior and culture still confuses him. Even with the help of the wonderfully educational device known as a television, he cannot figure out how one species can be so contradictory, yet still dominate their world. Now, he's about to experience first-hand how hypocritical and brutal humans can be. The Yeerks have acquired an animal-testing facility and a meat-packing plant. Put them together, and it's hardly likely that Visser Three is simply going into the fast-food business. To investigate, Ax and the Animorphs must infiltrate the lab... and witness the horror that is a modern slaughterhouse.

REVIEW: I've said before that Ax's books tend to be weaker than the rest. This is a decent example. Despite his superior intelligence, he remains baffled at simple human concepts, though his commentary on our species makes for more than a few chuckles. This book takes on the subjects of animal testing and modern meat production, but with little of Applegate's usual depth. Add to that the fact that the entire mission is something of a shaggy-dog adventure, and this book settles nicely into the murk of the mid-series slump.
Incidentally, my copy contains "bonus" bookmarks, featuring the cover illustration: Aximili morphing to bovine form. If Ax were to ask just what the purpose was of reproducing such an unremarkable image, when many more dynamic pictures have graced the covers of Animorphs books, I have to admit I wouldn't be able to defend my species very effectively.

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The Sickness
(The Animorphs series, Book 29)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
*****

DESCRIPTION: Cassie and her friends just wanted one ordinary night, a night when they could be regular kids at a school dance. Then Ax, in human morph, grows strangely delirious... the onset of an Andalite glandular illness that might be lethal. In the middle of hustling the erratically-demorphing alien from the school gym, Cassie is confronted by a mild-mannered teacher who seems strangely knowledgeable about her extracurricular alien-fighting activities. Mr. Tidwell and his Yeerk companion are part of the fledgling peace movement, comprised of Yeerks who don't want to be forced upon involuntary hosts, who want to find a better way than continual galactic war. He brings grim news: Aftran, the Yeerk who founded the movement after an eventful meeting with Cassie, has been captured, and Visser Three plans to interrogate her personally. Everything - the peace movement, the Animorphs, the fate of the Earth itself - rests on freeing Aftran from the Yeerk pool. A daunting challenge, even for the Animorphs at full strength. But Ax's disease is catching. One by one, the Animorphs fall ill... leaving Cassie on her own, with a dying Andalite and an impossible mission.

REVIEW: An excellent follow-through on Book 19 once more pits Cassie against herself. Making the choice to let Aftran (and her human host, young Karen) live was one thing: surviving the consequences, including this worst-case scenario, is quite another. In some ways, she's revealed to be the strongest of the Animorphs, sticking to her convictions even when they fly in the face of practical, hard-learned battle instinct. (In light of the series finale, this strength shines even brighter.) The side-story with Ax and the others falling ill adds a nice, if slightly plot-convenient, sense of urgency. And, once more, Erek the Chee comes into play, though for once he's not the reason for their current predicament. Coming as it does in the middle of an overall downgrade in quality, this book serves as a nice reminder of why I became hooked to begin with.
On an unrelated note, the ad campaign for K. A. Applegate's Everworld series (reviewed here) begins here. They were pitched at a distinctly older audience than the Animorphs books; I suspect that Scholastic realized by now that a fair chunk of the readership was over the target age.
And in yet another unrelated note, this book marks the halfway point of Project Animorph; 29 books down, 29 to go...

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Elfangor's Secret
(The Animorphs series, Megamorphs 3)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
****+

DESCRIPTION: Many years ago, a lost and war-weary young Andalite warrior came to Earth... and stayed. Prince Elfangor brought the Time Matrix, the most powerful piece of technology known in the galaxy, and buried it in an empty field, before morphing to human to live with the one person he truly loved. At least, until the Ellimist intervened, sending Elfangor back to the battle zone. But the Time Matrix remained - and, just before his death at the hands of Visser Three, Elfangor almost retrieved it.
Almost...
Now, Supreme Leader Jake rallies his friends - Marco, Cassie, Melissa, and Tobias - and an upstart alien to defend the Empire from the Yeerk invasion... a matter only slightly more pressing than Cassie's disturbingly rebellious remarks and his own nation's wars against the Primitives of South America. But - no. Something's wrong with time. Terribly wrong. The Yeerk known as Visser Four - smarting from the loss on Leera, a loss caused by the interference of the Animorphs - has located the Time Matrix, using it to manipulate history so that the Yeerks will have a much easier time conquering Earth. For once, the Ellimist and Crayak agree that Visser Four must be stopped... but the Crayak demands a price for giving the Animorphs a chance to set the timeline right. A life must be paid. Against the millions who will die in altered wars throughout history, a negligible cost, but that life will be one of their own.
The Animorphs have never hesitated before. They cannot afford to hesitate now, not when the alternative is to grow up in a slave-based society with a set of morals so twisted they can scarcely contemplate them. Even if one of them may not return from their journey through time...

REVIEW: I came close to clipping this another half-star. The set-up feels rushed; no explanation is given for how Visser Four, alone of all the Yeerks - with access to all that superior Yeerk technology - tracked down the Time Matrix and worked out how to use it, though it's implied that the Crayak himself might have been involved, only to regret it. Once that bump is over, the rest of the story moves quickly, twisting down dark paths through puzzles that strain not only the temporal but the moral fibers of the Animorphs to their utmost. "Right" and "wrong," "good guys" and "bad guys," all labels quickly lose their meaning as battles are lost that should be won, lives that should burn long are snuffed out, and flags that should fly are never sewn to begin with. Thrust into the heart of war after war, the blood toll and body count can't help but be high, and Applegate - as usual - doesn't pull punches. War is Hell, no matter what the reason, the era, or the timeline.
At the end of my copy, as in the previous book, is an ad for the short-lived line of Animorphs transforming action figures. Toy technology just cannot adequately combine a human figure with an animal without making both look very, very screwy...

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The Reunion
(The Animorphs series, Book 30)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
****+

DESCRIPTION: Marco meant to go to school that morning. He really did. But, plagued by persistent nightmares of his mother - last seen in a flooding underwater Yeerk facility, with the alien slug Visser One still wrapped tightly around her brain - he just couldn't face another mindless morning of classes, so he took the bus into town. That's when he saw her: his mother, Visser One, back on Earth but in disguise. The disaster off Royan Island cost her her rank, and made her a marked Yeerk - but if she's returned to the territory of her rival, Visser Three, she must have a plan for redemption. Infighting Vissers make a perfect opportunity for the Animorphs to disrupt the Yeerk invasion... and maybe, just maybe, give Marco a chance to save his mom in the chaos.
If they play their cards right, the Animorphs could end them both: Visser Three and Visser One, the leaders of the invasion. It's an opportunity they can't afford to pass up, but one fraught with dangers... and with no room to spare for sentimentality or impossible dreams of rescue. What will Marco sacrifice in the name of victory - and can he be trusted to make that sacrifice, with so much at stake?

REVIEW: On the heels of the war- and death-heavy Megamorphs 3 comes one of the darkest stories the Animorphs have yet told. Marco is torn between heart and head, between his own growing ruthlessness and the frantic dreams of a loving son forced to watch his mother's ongoing captivity in wretched silence. He keeps telling himself that he knows exactly what he's doing, that his sentimentality won't interfere with his judgement, but even immersing himself in an ice-cold mindset can't stop the white-hot pain of his predicament from burning him up inside. His family tragedy at the hands of the Yeerks always made the war more personal for him than the other Animorphs, even more personal than it is for Jake (whose brother, Tom, was the first blood-relative Controller the fledgling Animorphs discovered.) It only lost half a star because the opening feels weak and forced.

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The Conspiracy
(The Animorphs series, Book 31)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
*****

DESCRIPTION: Jake leads a dangerous life. He's the unofficial leader of the Animorphs, pitting himself and his closest friends against Yeerks most nights of the week. At home, he lives under the same roof as a human-Controller. His beloved older brother, Tom, may walk and talk and act like he used to, but an alien slug in his brain is really calling the shots. For the most part, Tom ignores Jake and lives his own life, as older teen brothers are wont to do. So, while Jake still must be on his guard, he's never felt directly threatened under his own roof.
Until now.
His beloved great-grandfather has just died, tossing the family into upheaval. Their parents are taking Jake and Tom out to his cabin for the wake and funeral - a trip of four days at the least. Only the Yeerk in Tom's head needs access to Kandrona rays from the Yeerk pool every three days. Suddenly, there's a new battle line in the Yeerk war... a line straight through the center of Jake's house. A line between Tom and Jake... and Jake's father. Jake doesn't know what Tom's Yeerk means to do, but he knows one thing: he won't let the aliens take his father. No matter what the cost.

REVIEW: This book forms a perfect mirror with Book 30. When Marco had to deal with potentially killing his own mother in The Reunion, Jake kept telling him he was too close to the situation to make the call. Now, the leader of the Animorphs finds his own family turned into sacrificial pieces on the gameboard... and when his best friend, Marco, tries to tell him (from personal experience) that it's not a battle he's equipped to deal with, Jake doesn't take it well, to say the least. In this book, it becomes abundantly clear how the war is changing the Animorphs team... not for the better. These are not the same five children who wandered through an abandoned construction site at the start of the series. Jake finds himself doing things he never thought himself capable of - and ordering others, his friends and allies, to do things nobody should have to do. On its own, this book might've rated four or four and a half stars, but taken with the book before it, it forms a dark, bleak profile of two lives and one friendship irrevocably changed by the horrors of combat. These insights are truly what lifted the Animorphs series above the average young adult action serial.

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The Separation
(The Animorphs series, Book 32)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
***

DESCRIPTION: Rachel knows she shouldn't use morphing for personal reasons, especially not on a field trip. But the earring that fell into the tide pool was a special gift from her father. Besides, nobody would see her, and it's not like the starfish has a brain that's going to give her trouble. In and out in a couple of minutes, then back to the rest of the class.
Then came the little kid. The one with the sharp little shovel... a shovel just the right size to slice a small starfish in two.
Most animals would've died, but starfish have amazing regenerative powers. When it's time to demorph, suddenly there are two Rachels. But they are hardly identical. One is the soul of compassion, full of fear, while the other embodies the terrible, bloodthirsty rage that lurks deep within her mind. It turns out two aren't always better than one - especially when one of those two wants to kill first and think later and the other is too paralyzed by her own fears to stop her darker half.

REVIEW: I came close to lopping another half-star off the rating, here. One of the weakest books in the series, it takes the "evil twin" chestnut and does precisely nothing original with it... except have the Rachels act so entirely out of character that they danged near blow the Animorphs' cover more times than a starfish has legs. The concept grew stale quickly, the narrated thoughts of both Rachels being too extreme to engender much interest. The solution comes more or less out of nowhere, for the purpose of setting everything right before the next book. About the only mytharc progression is the introduction of the experimental Anti-Morphing Ray, which comes into play in the next installment. Not a stellar book, but at least it reads quickly... a virtue I've come to admire, having struggled through some very tiresome and densely-written tales of late.

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The Illusion
(The Animorphs series, Book 33)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
****+

DESCRIPTION: Tobias was once an ordinary boy... or so he thought. Then he became trapped in the body of a red-tailed hawk, a predator whose mind became part of his own. Later, he regained the ability to morph: a hawk who could walk as a boy again, but only for two hours at a time. And then he learned that his real father, a man he had never known, was no man at all, but the Andalite Elfangor - who had, for the sake of love, become a nothlit, voluntarily trapping himself in a human body until the Ellimist sent him back to his homeworld.
Boy? Hawk? Animorph? Andalite? Who is Tobias? Even he doesn't know anymore...
The Animorphs set out to destroy the Yeerk's newest weapon: the Anti-Morphing Ray, which - if it works - will force them to demorph in mid-combat. Revealing their human bodies, their true identities. But Jake has a plan to convince the Yeerks that their newest toy is so much scrap metal. See, they can't force an Andalite to demorph if that warrior's true body is an animal... a hawk. Tobias knows the plan could be fatal, but for all the confusion about who he is, he knows what he is.
A warrior.
And no warrior, especially not the son of Prince Elfangor, would hesitate to die for the sake of the greater good.

REVIEW: On the story front, this book felt a bit weak... but, then, the Animorphs series isn't just about fighting aliens and freeing Earth. It's about the characters, about how they grow and change under the strains of war. As a character portrait, exploring perhaps the most complex of the Animorphs, The Illusion succeeds brilliantly. (I suspect this is also the book that launched a thousand fanfics - the sometimes-strained relationship between Rachel and Tobias, which seems even more angst-ridden and doomed than that of Romeo and Juliet, comes to the forefront here, with Rachel showing a rare, tender side of herself that only Tobias gets to see.) It also continues Applegate's trend of showing different faces of the Yeerk enemy, in this case an embittered, voluntary human host who personally handles Tobias's interrogation/torture. The Anti-Morphing Ray itself proves a non-event, but the book really wasn't about it, anyway. After the disappointment of the previous installment, I enjoyed a return to depth here.

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The Prophecy
(The Animorphs series, Book 34)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
***+

DESCRIPTION: When Cassie saw the free Hork-Bajir Jara Hamee lurking outside her barn, she knew there was trouble. Summoning the rest of the team, she heads to the hidden valley of the free Hork-Bajir, where a strange alien awaits him. Quafijinivon claims to be the last of the Arn, the highly intelligent race that created the Hork-Bajir... and whose apathy about that race's fate led to their own extermination when the Yeerks and Andalites turned the planet into a war zone. He wants to use the DNA of the free Hork-Bajir to repopulate their home world and form a new resistance - but to do that, the cloned colonists will need weapons. The Andalite-turned-Hork-Bajir Aldrea was supposed to have stolen a large cache of weaponry just before she and her mate, Dak Hamee, were killed, but never relayed that information to anyone else. But all is not lost: the Arn has her "essence," her stored personality and memories, which needs only a host body to waken. If anyone could locate the cache, it would be Aldrea. But she has been dead for many years... when the mission is done, will she readily relinquish her host, or will she fight for this second life as hard as she did when she truly lived?

REVIEW: Mostly an excuse to follow up on The Hork-Bajir Chronicles (reviewed via a link below), the logic and premise - not to mention certain aspects of the mission's execution - twist Animorphs canon to the point of breaking. (If you haven't read The Hork-Bajir Chronicles yet, you'll definitely be thrown for a loop.) Aldrea works through some identity issues, learning to respect the "inferior" humans (and even come to terms with her Andalite origins), but beyond that the secondary layers that make so many Animorphs books so good just weren't there. Still, it's not as weak as Book 32, and the Animorphs kick some serious Yeerk hindquarters.

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The Proposal
(The Animorphs series, Book 35)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
***

DESCRIPTION: As far as the rest of the world is concerned, Marco's mother died two years ago, drowned in a boating accident. But Marco and the Animorphs know better - enslaved by the Yeerk known as Visser One, she had merely completed her assignment, turning over direct control of the invasion to the Andalite-Controller Visser Three. Since then, he has met his mother in the field of combat, has seen her fall... but no body was ever found, meaning his mother still lives, a slave to an alien parasite.
But Marco's father still thinks she's dead. And that's become a problem, now that he's dating again. Not just casual dating, either; this is serious. Too serious for Marco.
The Animorphs have just learned that William Roger Tennant, a popular self-help guru, is actually a human-Controller, who plans to use his upcoming primetime network debut to lure millions of innocents to The Sharing, the Yeerk front organization. Discrediting his golden-boy image is the only way to stop the plot - but Marco's having trouble with his morphs. The stress of his home life causes him to warp into impossible hybrid beasts. If he can't get himself under control, it won't be Tennant who will be exposed. It'll be Marco and the Animorphs.

REVIEW: A rough redressing of Rachel's DNA allergy from Book 12, the story sputters along on fumes from previous adventures, throwing in some half-hearted efforts at levity with Marco's morph of Euclid, his would-be-stepmother's annoying toy poodle. Granted, I could believe Marco would have some issues dealing with his father's plans for remarriage, but I'd already seen this general story arc in The Reaction, which played more convincingly. Little originality and minimal new developments make it a largely forgettable installment... save the way it ends on a cliffhanger, segueing into the return of Marco's mom/Visser One in Visser (reviewed via a link below.)

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The Mutation
(The Animorphs series, Book 36)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
****

DESCRIPTION: Ever since losing the Pemalite ship to the "Andalite bandits" (and the interference of Crayak's pet, the devious Drode), Visser Three has become obsessed with recovering it... and, not incidentally, restoring his damaged reputation with the Yeerk High Council. Just how far will he go? Late at night, Jake receives a phone call from a shaken Cassie. The free Hork-Bajir have brought one of their own to her in hopes that she can heal him... and fix the horrible, bungled aquatic mutations the Visser grafted onto his body.
The Chee confirm that Visser Three is planning a deep-sea expedition to locate the Pemalite ship, using a brand-new craft known as the Sea Blade. Jake and the Animorphs race to stop him... only to find themselves facing an even greater danger. For down beneath the ocean lurks a secret nearly as old as human civilization, a lost world scavenging the detritus of humanity's oceanic explorations. The Animorphs would just as soon abandon the Yeerk craft and its crew to these strangers... until they're caught, too.

REVIEW: A marked improvement from the last book, it still has a touch of "gimmick" spray-painted across the plot. (Does everyone need an Atlantis storyline?) The undersea civilization may be a bit of a stretch, but Applegate manages to put an original stamp on a threadbare plot device. The idea of being forced to cooperate with one's enemy to escape a more imminent threat is also old, but the alliance doesn't dominate nearly as much of the book as the cover blurb implies. Not their greatest adventure ever, but a fun and action-packed outing nevertheless... and a hopeful sign that the series hadn't yet jumped the shark.
On another unrelated note, the next phase of the Animorphs Transformers line of toys is advertized in the back of my copy. The action figure of Visser Three looks especially sad...

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The Weakness
(The Animorphs series, Book 37)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
****

DESCRIPTION: With Jake out of town, the Animorphs figured they'd lay low for a few days. But Tobias has stumbled onto Visser Three's new feeding grounds - the place where he's most vulnerable. Ever since the Animorphs' last strike, the Visser has been very careful to change meadows every few days, so they don't have time to wait for their leader. In cheetah morph, under Rachel's leadership, they go in - and find themselves stymied by a new enemy.
The Councilor has come to monitor Visser Three's progress, and his host body, a Garatron, functions at such a speed he makes cheetahs look like tree sloths. Thwarted, Rachel comes up with a new plan: hammer the Yeerks now, while the Visser's under the microscope, and maybe throw the entire Earth invasion into chaos. After all, Yeerk politics have helped the Animorphs before. But last time, they were under Jake's leadership. Rachel's more direct style could be a change for the better - or the worse. And, considering how many close calls they've had, worse could all too easily be deadly.

REVIEW: Rising back toward their old form like a bald eagle riding a thermal, The Weakness brings back some of the internal struggles - both within the group and within the narrator - that are a trademark of the series. Rachel tries to be as strong a leader as Jake, but her personality doesn't cope as well with the planning and the pressure. Through poor luck and hubris, she nearly dooms them all... but no leader gets to walk away from their own messes, no matter how impossible they look. This one doesn't push the credulity envelope quite as bad as the previous few books, though parts of the story feel like arguments Rachel had with herself (literally, sometimes) in The Separation. Still, a fairly satisfying installment on the whole.

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The Arrival
(The Animorphs series, Book 38)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
****

DESCRIPTION: Ever since Aximili's brother Prince Elfangor gave five human children the power to morph, they pinned their hopes on the eventual arrival of more Andalites. As much as the Animorphs have harrassed the Yeerks, as much of a thorn in the side as they've been to Visser Three, they simply could not win the war to liberate Earth from the invading alien parasites. While rescuing an ally Chee from human-Controllers, Ax suddenly finds himself side-by-side with a female aristh. Andalites - here at last! His hearts rejoice! But Estrid and her companions have their own agenda... and Ax has learned the hard way that his own people can be as cruel and amoral as the Yeerks. Just what has brought this ship to Earth - and why are they taking such pains not to reveal their mission to Ax?

REVIEW: As usual, Ax's story tends to be weaker than the other Animorphs' books. He spends less time wrestling with his loyalty to humans and more time watching his fellow Andalites with a mistrustful eye... a fact that surprises even him. The female Estrid momentarily blurs his thoughts - he is, after all, an adolescent Andalite - but fails to keep him from figuring out the visitors' true mission. The book almost lost half a star towards the end, revealing that key information was deliberately left out of the narrative. In the end, while the Andalite relief fleets are no nearer to Earth, the Animorphs - and Ax - nevertheless prove themselves more than capable of soldiering on. If it wasn't the best in the series, well, I've slogged through worse.

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The Hidden
(The Animorphs series, Book 39)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
***+

DESCRIPTION: The puny Helmacrons left months ago, leaving behind nothing but the wreckage of one of their toy-sized spaceships. Unfortunately, Helmacron technology can detect morphing energy... and, somehow, the Yeerks managed to repair the sensors on their ship. The strongest source of morphing energy on Earth is Elfangor's blue box, the Andalite device that transfers morphing capabilities. And Visser Three will stop at nothing to get his hands on it.
As Cassie and her friends begin a deadly game of hide and seek, the unthinkable happens. An animal - an African Cape buffalo bull - somehow triggers the blue box's powers - and unthinkingly acquires a human morph. Cassie knows it cannot be allowed to live. At best, it's an abomination. At worst, it's a liability; if the Yeerks caught it and infested it, it would unthinkingly reveal the identity of the Animorphs. But she can't reconcile herself to the bull's destruction, especially as its sometimes-human brain begins learning with unexpected speed. On the loose in the woods, the unnatural mutant seems to think the Animorphs are its herd... and, to a buffalo, a herd is to be defended at all costs. Even against Taxxons, Hork-Bajir, and the ultimate Abomination, Visser Three himself.

REVIEW: Yet another bend-till-it-breaks warping of Animorphs canon forms the backbone of the subplot; the idea of an animal accidentally triggering the blue cube seems on par with an animal accidentally bumping against a computer and coding a website. The general idea of outrunning a morph-seeker hearkens back to the first Megamorphs book, as well. Still, it's not all bad. Cassie wonders whether human DNA can make a subsentient animal into something more, even as she knows that the necessities of war, and not philosophical puzzles or ethics, will determine the bull's fate. I might have considered dropping this a half-star for general lack of originality, but I just read a far more atrocious YA book (Witch & Wizard, by James Patterson); by comparison, I danged near bumped this one clear up to Great.
On a vaguely related note, my copy - with the original "morph" cover cutout to an internal illustration - demonstrates that this stretch of the series just wasn't getting the oversight it needed. The cutout cuts right through the front-cover "hype" excerpt, leaving word fragments to either side.

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The Other
(The Animorphs series, Book 40)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
***+

DESCRIPTION: Marco doesn't get many evenings home by himself, what with being part of the Animorphs and defending the planet from alien parasites and all. After his father remarried, he had even fewer nights alone. But, for once, the Yeerks are quiet and the Animorphs are off-duty. At least, until Marco's channel-surfing thumb leads him to an amateur video on national TV: an unidentified shape in the woods, little more than a four-footed blur. A blue blur.
An Andalite. But not Aximili, or Visser Three.
Investigating, Marco and his friends discover that Ax wasn't the only survivor of the Dome ship that was destroyed over Earth. Two more warriors survived... more or less. One of the pair, Mertil, lost part of his tail - a shameful deformity in Andalite culture. The other, the giant Gafinilan, seems to be Mertil's protector, but there's something very odd about his behavior that sets off Marco's inner alarms. Maybe it's the way he refuses to join in the fight against the Yeerks. Maybe it's his peculiar mood swings. Or maybe it has something to do with why, ever since that video, there's been no trace of Mertil...

REVIEW: Another book in the past-midpoint drift... Since we just had a visit from Andalites two installments ago, it seems a bit soon to play the "More Andalites on Earth" card again. It's also a bit odd that only now, so long after the crash, does anyone seem to notice that Elfangor's ship wasn't the only one to enter Earth's atmosphere intact. But that's as maybe... Some of the paranoia and veiled intentions of previous books returns here, as Marco struggles to figure out Gafinilan's angle: is he a coward, a Yeerk traitor, or something else? The handicap prejudice of the Andalites, as embodied in Ax's categoric dismissal of Mertil, feels more like a political-correctness statement than a natural development. Like the previous book, The Other may not approach the complexity and interest level of the peak of the series, but it nevertheless entertains.

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The Familiar
(The Animorphs series, Book 41)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
***

DESCRIPTION: After yet another loss to the Yeerks, the stresses of battle nearly tear the Animorphs apart. Marco nearly got himself killed when Rachel refused the order to retreat. Cassie feels the deaths of the Hork-Bajir-Controllers she took out, innocent creatures enslaved by their Yeerk masters, crushing her soul. Tobias and Ax have their own personal problems, drawing them apart from the group. And Jake... Jake can hardly find the energy to care anymore.
He stumbles home, nearly running into his Yeerk-controlled brother Tom, before crashing in bed. How can he go on like this? His own friends, his warriors, at each others' throats, the Yeerk invasion marching on with nary a stumble for all their efforts, knowing that the Andalite warships that they'd been counting on for relief may not show up for years (if at all)... the war might as well already be over.
Jake wakes up the next morning to find himself in a strange room, wearing strange clothes, in a body that is strange... but familiar. It's his own body, aged maybe ten years. He looks out the window to see the New York City skyline - only radically altered. Yeerk Bug fighters and Andalite warships swoop over the gloomy city streets - but as allies, not enemies.
Is this a dream? Is this the work of the Crayak or the Ellimist? Has Jake finally gone insane? Or did the Yeerks win the galactic war?

REVIEW: The "dream" episode is almost invariably a sign that the writers of a given franchise are running out of ideas... or killing time before sweeps. This book seems to fall in a similar category. The nightmare world Jake wakes into is too riddled with inconsistencies for even him to fully believe, yet he has little choice but to endure it; pain, even in a dream, is still pain, and he's not willing to bet his life that none of it is real. There's enough weirdness and action, and enough personal torment on the part of Jake (who blames himself for this "future" and the fates of his friends and family), to keep turning pages. Still, it's hard to feel much urgency over what is clearly an unreal situation. It ends with what amounts to a cop-out... one with absolutely no follow-through in the rest of the series. That pointless conclusion lopped off the half-star over Okay that it almost earned.

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Back to Before
(The Animorphs series, Megamorphs 4)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
****+

DESCRIPTION: Another battle done. Another night over. Jake crawls away from devastation, from pain, from blood - the enemy's blood and his own. At home, he tries to forget, but can't. How did this burden fall upon his shoulders? How can he go on like this? If only he'd never walked home through the construction site... had never met Prince Elfangor in his dying moments... had never heard of morphing or the Yeerks.
Thanks to the Drode, meddling assistant to the evil Crayak, and a bargain with the (sometimes) benevolent Ellimist, Jake's wish is granted. He and his friends took the long way home from the mall. But that doesn't mean that their lives are safe. After all, just because you don't know you have enemies doesn't mean they aren't out get you...

REVIEW: This book answers the question that fans (and fanfic writers) were asking themselves since the start of the series: could Jake and his friends have resisted the Yeerks even if they'd missed their fateful meeting with Elfangor, and never acquired the power to morph? The characters drift off in their own directions, but somehow keep finding themselves coming to the same conclusion: something very, very strange is going on in their hometown. Jake grows suspicious of the Sharing after his brother Tom pushes him too hard to join. Tobias, on the other hand, becomes their perfect victim, a troubled and bullied boy who finally thinks he's found a place where he belongs. Marco and Rachel spot Marco's dead mother, while Cassie fights a persistent feeling that something is terribly wrong with time itself. Perhaps the most profound difference is Ax; forced to escape the wreckage of the Dome ship alone, he attempts to expose and destroy the Yeerks entirely on his own, a lost alien on a primitive, hostile world. With action, paranoia, and a grim sense of fatality, this might've earned a solid Great rating, but for two things. First off, it is, ultimately, a redundant timeline, a classic sci-fi cop-out. Secondly, it strikes a very similar note to The Familiar (where Jake experiences a simulated future Earth under Yeerk rule), which was released at the same time. Ordinarily, two negatives like that would've dropped it a full star in the ratings, but, as I've mentioned before, I've been on a mediocre-to-bad reading streak lately. It was also nice to see the series pick back up after some less-impressive installments. Overall it's perhaps the darkest and most powerful of the four Megamorphs titles.

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The Journey
(The Animorphs series, Book 42)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
**+

DESCRIPTION: Another mission, another victory - but, as Rachel and her friends demorph after the battle, something goes wrong. They're spotted - and photographed. Yeerk or innocent bystander, it doesn't matter. They need that film, before Visser Three finds out that the "Andalite bandits" are just human kids. But their plans to snatch the camera are disrupted by the return of an old enemy.
The Helmacrons, pint-sized problems with gargantuan egos, agreed never to return to Earth if they were allowed to recharge their ship on the "morphing energy" from Elfangor's blue cube. Unfortunately, bargains made with lesser species mean nothing to them. They've returned - and this time, they've taken a hostage. Before anyone can stop them, a team of Helmacrons has marched up Marco's nose. Once inside him, they pose a serious problem: their Dracon beams could do some real damage, especially if they get as far as his heart. The Animorphs put their camera mission on hold to free their friend, using the shrink ray of the Helmacron ship... only something goes wrong. The shrink ray works too well, reducing them to cellular size. The Helmacrons sabotaged their own technology, knowing the Animorphs would use it to follow them. Now they're too small to harm even the tiny Helmacrons, and the clock is ticking both on the missing camera and on Marco's life.
But the Helmacrons made one mistake: they made Rachel mad.

REVIEW: I believe this represents the nadir of the Animorphs series. The Helmacrons, irritating in their first adventure, are even more annoying in their return. The whole concept feels pitched at a lower level than the rest of the books, with its focus on snot and phlegm and Magic School Bus-like tour of the body. With a plot this shallow and villains this silly, there's no room for depth, let alone interest. The writing style doesn't even read like Applegate. Like the first Helmacron encounter (in Book 24, The Suspicion), this adventure wraps up with a quick non-conclusion. A clear case of series padding, or author burnout.

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The Test
(The Animorphs series, Book 43)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
*****

DESCRIPTION: Of all the Animorphs, Tobias has made the most sacrifices. On their first mission to the Yeerk pool, he gave up his humanity when he became a nothlit, trapped in hawk morph. Regaining his morphing ability through the interference of the Ellimist, Tobias had a chance to return to human - to stay a human forever, to be with Rachel as a normal boy - but chose to remain in the fight as an Animorph. When they needed someone to destroy the Yeerks' Anti-Morphing Ray, Tobias volunteered to be the test subject... and endured unimaginable torture at the hands of Taylor, the sadistically insane sub-visser in charge of the project. That was when he nearly gave up his own sanity, and the horror, the weakness of being entirely in Taylor's control, still haunts him.
Tobias had thought Taylor dead; she displeased Visser Three, after all, and few who fail him once last long enough to do so again. But then, after being injured by an eagle attack and sent to an animal hospital, there she was. His captor. His torturer. His bane. Instead of killing him, however, she lets him go - after telling him that she wants the help of his friends. Many Yeerks, she claims, are unhappy with how the Vissers and the Council have botched their empire's expansion. She wants to destroy Visser Three and spark a revolution that will resonate across the galaxy. Taylor has a plan that is every bit as heartless as she is, devastatingly simple. A victory in one blow.
Tobias is torn. On the one hand, the chance to cause trouble for the invasion is too good to pass up, even if it means partnering with such an unsavory, unstable person. On the other, he alone knows just how evil Taylor truly is at heart... and how hard it is to break free of her clutches.

REVIEW: How many middle-grade books explore the ramifications of torture and post-traumatic stress? Not many. Applegate writes a brilliant follow-up to Tobias's darkest adventure, pitting the tortured against the torturer on an ever-shifting playing field. He struggles to reconcile his lingering sense of helplessness and weakness, his shame at having been broken, with the the greater needs of the war and his friends - and, by overcompensating, nearly destroys everything he's ever fought for. The Animorphs find their ethics tested and twisted to the utmost, as they weigh the costs of victory at any price against their own humanity. The war has changed them all, leaving scars that will never heal. They aren't children anymore, but soldiers in the truest sense of the word. A fine return to form after the inane meanderings of Book 42.

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The Unexpected
(The Animorphs series, Book 44)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
**+

DESCRIPTION: When Cassie and her friends got wind of alien wreckage discovered by the government, they knew they had to act fast. The Yeerks would do anything to keep any evidence of their technology from ending up in official hands, which means that the Animorphs must ensure that it does just that. Powerful as the invasion has grown, it's still not strong enough to withstand the forces of national defenses should the feds be alerted. During the mission, Cassie becomes separated from the others. One firefight later, and she finds herself in the cargo hold of a jumbo jet... with Yeerk Bug fighters hot on her trail.
By the skin of her teeth and the speed of her morph, she manages to escape, to find herself in the middle of a vast red desert... the Australian Outback. It's not the kind of place the Yeerks would be interested in - unless, of course, they thought an Andalite was hiding there. All alone, in a strange land, Cassie fights for her survival on the slim hope of returning home.

REVIEW: This might've squeaked by with an Okay rating, but it was just too unoriginal to pull it off. The story feels like a "field trip" filler episode of a sagging TV show, when they move the cast and crew to an exotic location in a misguided attempt to boost ratings. Being seen by a native boy who helps her fight back comes straight out of The Extreme (Book 25), when a Native American helps the team find a polar bear to morph. Also like that book, the natives take people turning into animals in stride due to their cultural heritage, mostly because the book doesn't want to have to deal with the ramifications of outsiders learning about the Animorphs. Aside from meeting an Aboriginal boy and visiting Oz, this book serves no purpose in the mytharc. Cassie's character doesn't grow, the Yeerks are neither helped nor hindered by the sidetrack, and the whole adventure amounts to a delaying tactic before the next book, which begins the build-up to the series finale in Book 54. It's not a bad story, per se, but Applegate is capable of so much better... and gratuitous padding like this just cheapens the series. (The book also missed a bet: Australia is home to animals with some of the deadliest poisons on Earth, a worthy addition to the morphing arsenal. The only native Australian Cassie does morph is a red kangaroo, which she could've found at the zoo back home.)

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The Revelation
(The Animorphs series, Book 45)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
***+

DESCRIPTION: From the first, the Animorphs have struggled to keep their families - most of them probably innocent, at least one a human-Controller - from learning of their abilities, let alone the fight against the Yeerks. To do so would put all of them in danger. If need be, they know they'll probably have to sacrifice loved ones for the sake of the cause. Marco, of all the Animorphs, should know this: his mother, long thought drowned, lives as the enslaved host of Visser One. Even when his father fell in love again and remarried, he kept his mouth shut, kept living the lie that his real mother was dead. The greater good prevailed.
But then his father came home from work one evening, babbling about a revolutionary breakthrough at the engineering firm where he works: the discovery of a brand-new layer of existence. Zero-space.
The nondimension where extruded mass goes during small morphs... and where alien spaceships travel interstellar distances in days rather than centuries. Marco and his friends know more about Zero-space than any other free humans... until now.
So far, the Yeerks have maintained their cloak of secrecy, lacking the strength and firepower to take on human military forces in the open. But if a human blundered onto their Zero-space transmissions, the hiding would be over. The only way to stop Earth from learning of their invasion is to infiltrate the project. Make Controllers out of the engineers involved.
Including Marco's father.
He's already lost his mother to Visser One. Can he stand by, like a good soldier, and let Dad be taken by the enemy? Or will he do something very brave, very stupid, and very, very dangerous, for him and the rest of his friends... like finally reveal his secret identity to the only family he has left?

REVIEW: After maintaining a holding pattern for longer than was strictly necessary, the series kicks into gear again in the countdown to the finale, a mere nine books out. Compressing events that could've unfolded more naturally over two or three books into one makes for a bit of a rushed story, unfortunately. There isn't time for the full emotional impact of the mytharc-changing events to be properly established or explored. As the title implies (and the preview blurbs explicitly reveal), Marco's father becomes the first of the Animorphs' relatives to learn of their secret identities - a revelation he takes remarkably well, all things considered. That alone could've made up the core of a good book, but Applegate shoehorns in three or four more major alterations. By the end, the final ultimatum has been sounded, the final deadline placed before the Yeerks take the invasion out of the shadows. It should've been a far more profound moment, but instead it was lost in the general rush. A little disappointing, but not enough to put me off reading on - then or now.

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The Deception
(The Animorphs series, Book 46)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
****

DESCRIPTION: Since coming to Earth on board the doomed Andalite Dome ship with his war-hero brother, Aximili has changed in many ways. Once an untested aristh, a warrior-cadet, he has now fought more Yeerks than many Andalite adults. Once convinced of the moral and technological superiority of his species, he has been humbled - and disappointed - many times. But, still, he clung to the hope that the Andalites would come to liberate Earth from the Yeerk threat, that he and his friends were merely fighting to delay Visser Three's forces.
Now he knows better.
Almost overnight, the tone of the invasion has shifted. What once was a stealth mission moves toward all-out war, now that Visser Three has been officially promoted to the rank of Visser One. His first act is brilliant, ruthless, and bold: trigger a third World War, and let humans exhaust their weapons and resources exterminating each other until no possible resistance can be mounted.
The Animorphs, of course, hurry to thwart the Visser's plans... but they're used to guerrilla warfare and infiltration, quick strikes against the enemy, melting into the shadows before the violence and death toll rises too high. Ax and his companions thought they were blooded warriors already - but, now, they're about to get their first taste of real, open, no-holds-barred war. And they'll learn that, when it comes to war, they have a lot to learn: about the enemy, and about themselves.

REVIEW: This book, which picks up literally where the last one left off, danged near lost itself a half-star. The change in tone, the higher body count and blood cost, has been so abrupt that it almost reads like an entirely different series. It didn't help that a fair chunk of this book relied on in-depth knowledge of the armaments and infrastructure of a modern Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, which Jake and his friends spew out in long strings of technobabble. If nothing else, the character evolution is thrown into sharp relief at the Animorphs' first taste of all-out war - at least, their first taste on Earth, in their own timeline, in a battle that they cannot sidestep or back away from because it's not their fight. Ax especially learns just how far he's willing to go to save humans and defeat the Yeerk scheme; like Elfangor before him, Ax has been seduced by the primitive, contradictory natives of Earth (though not in so literal a sense as his big brother,) but even he is surprised at just what he'll sacrifice in the name of victory. Bloody, violent, fast-paced, and dark, The Deception continues what Book 45 started, a mad race to the ultimate confrontation between Animorph and Yeerk.

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The Resistance
(The Animorphs series, Book 47)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
****

DESCRIPTION: Everything's falling apart. Visser Three is now Visser One. The secret invasion moves toward open warfare. The Andalite relief ships aren't coming, now or - most likely - ever. Already Marco and his family are officially "dead," hiding with the free Hork-Bajir in the mountains beyond the national forest. How much longer before Rachel has to join them? Or Cassie? Jake, leader of the Animorphs, doesn't know how much more he can stand, how much longer he can hold out against impossible odds.
While cleaning out the basement for his mother, Jake finds an old family heirloom: the uniform and diary of Lieutenant Isaiah Fitzhenry, Civil War soldier. The tale of Fitzhenry's battle, a battle with too few troops and unreliable orders and an undefeated Rebel general whose forces vastly outnumber and outgun his own, eerily mimics Jake's fight... especially when Cassie calls with grim news. One of the free Hork-Bajir has been captured and re-infested. With a guide to lead them, the Yeerk troops are heading straight toward the hidden valley sanctuary. It's a death trap, with no way out - but the Hork-Bajir refuse to flee. And Jake has no choice but to lead them in a fight that cannot be won.

REVIEW: Drawn in shades of blood red, hopeless white, and black smears of despair and foreshadowing, The Resistance brings the battle to the sheltered Hork-Bajir. Like the previous book, innocent bystanders find themselves in the line of fire, forced by cruel circumstance to take up arms against an enemy they didn't know existed and fight - or die - in a war they do not understand. The alternate-chapter cuts to Isaiah Fitzhenry's diary, describing his doomed efforts to protect a town from Rebel soldiers, drove home parallels about racism (or speciesism), freedom, and the dark reality of war with concussive force. Further hints are dropped that, during the "holding pattern" stories, plenty has been happening that the readers were left unaware of - for instance, Jake and his friends finally learned how to morph clothing other than Spandex. It makes me wish that the publishing schedule hadn't been so brutal, so Applegate herself could've had more time to develop those stories (or at least more time to properly oversee the efforts of the ghostwriters.)

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The Return
(The Animorphs series, Book 48)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
***+

DESCRIPTION: For weeks now, Rachel has been plagued by nightmares. Anyone in her shoes - given the ability to morph animals, thrown onto the front lines of a war against parasitic alien invaders, constantly in fear of discovery by her enemies - would be insane not to have bad dreams, but Rachel's are worse than normal. In them, her dark side, the bloodthirsty beast in her own heart, takes over, threatening her friends and comrades even as she thrills in its amoral power. But they're just dreams... or are they?
Rachel finds herself trapped in a multi-layered nightmare, too real to be a dream yet too impossible to be reality. At the center of it lurks the evil red eye of Crakak... and a white rat named David. The seventh Animorph whom they trapped in rat morph when he went rogue. Crayak offers Rachel's dark side a chance to emerge, to flourish. It has the strength to destroy Visser One. It has the power to save Earth. And all it will cost is one life: the life of Jake, the leader of the Animorphs.
If Rachel accepts the Crayak's gift, she will become the most powerful being in this sector of the galaxy. If she rejects it, she'll end up with David: trapped as a rat. Forever.

REVIEW: This book, following through on Crayak's earlier attempt to seduce Rachel to his side of the conflict, stumbles by trying too hard. It wants to be Rachel's equivalent of Tobias's torture at the hands of the mad Yeerk Taylor in The Illusion (Book 33), crossed with a follow-through on the fate of David and some temptation- of-evil for good measure. Any one of those, alone, might have made a stronger story, but mashed together it just becomes too surreal. The whole book has a nightmarish overtone, as Crayak bends and warps reality on a whim to ensare Rachel in his plans. Given the series finale, there's more than a little character foreshadowing here, as she confronts the reality of her near-addiction to the danger of warfare; even if the Yeerks left tomorrow, she'll never be able to pretend she's an ordinary girl again, that she'll be happy just shopping at The Gap or chilling in front of the TV. It's been a theme with her character since the beginning, and the degree to which it's come to dominate her life shows just how severely the war has affected her. David, in his return, does less than I might have expected - and, frankly, of all the characters the Animorphs have encountered, all the tantalizing loose threads from previous adventures, I wouldn't have picked him as the one to revisit. Still, given that it reads more like a head-trip than an active progression of the mytharc, the book does its job.

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The Diversion
(The Animorphs series, Book 49)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
****

DESCRIPTION: Since becoming Animorphs, joining the fight against the unseen Yeerk enemy, Tobias and his friends fought not only for the Earth, but for the safety of their families. Even Jake, whose older brother Tom is a high-ranked human-Controller, would do anything to protect them. For a long time, it was merely a hypothetical threat; Visser One remained convinced that the "bandits" harrying the invasion were trained Andalite warriors.
Now, he's figured out the truth.
As the Animorphs scramble to figure out how much the Yeerks know, and how to save their families (if it's not already too late), Tobias makes a startling discovery: his mother, who abandoned him when he was little more than a baby, is still alive. She lives just a few blocks from where the human boy Tobias cried himself to sleep at night in his uncaring uncle's house, inventing story after story about why she'd left, and when she'd come back for him.
How much will Tobias risk to meet her? How much is her life - the life of a woman who was barely a mother to him, who never even bothered walking down the block to see him - worth? And why can't Tobias seem to leave her behind as easily as she left him?

REVIEW: After Marco revealed his secret to his father in The Revelation (Book 45), this story - the endangerment of the Animorphs' families, the decision whether or not to sacrifice their own flesh and blood to the Yeerks - was inevitable. Tobias would normally be an outsider in such a decision; even when he was human, his "family" was little more than a roof over his head and (sometimes) a meal on the table at night. Bringing his long-lost mother Loren, last seen as a kid in The Andalite Chronicles, felt a bit like a stretch in the logic department, but it gave Tobias (and the readers) a sense of closure on her story. The reunion is bittersweet, as Tobias finally learns just why she walked out on him, but if he thought he'd have a TV-movie reconciliation that erased all the scars of his past, he's sadly mistaken... especially when the Yeerks are still gunning for him and his friends, and are no longer afraid of the consequences of public displays of force. The tension continues to ratchet up on the way to the finale.
On a side note, the original cover's morph shows a serious misunderstanding of how a hawk would morph into a dog... a further sign that the series is nearing the end of its active shelf life.

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The Ultimate
(The Animorphs series, Book 50)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
****+

DESCRIPTION: Life in the Hork-Bajir refugee camp is stressful enough. Add in too-close quarters, parents who still cannot accept the real and imminent danger of the Yeerks, the knowledge that, however much they drill and practice, they simply cannot survive a direct assault, and the fact that Jake's family - mother, father, and brother - are all Controllers... well, it's hardly a wonder that the Animorphs are falling apart. Cassie watches helplessly as Jake's fire dwindles to a cold, empty pit of apathy. She no longer knows him, the boy she used to consider more than a friend. He needs help.
He needs more troops. More Animorphs. Because, even though the experiment with David turned out to be a disaster, the original six can no longer fight this war alone.
The trouble is finding people who will, unlike their parents (or most adults, in their experience), accept the dangers and the responsibilities of morphing... and who are guaranteed not to already have an alien slug in their brains. Cassie knows just where to recruit, from a population that the Yeerks - and the humans - dismiss without a second thought. The hospital beds of sick and disabled children.
But, even as she tells Jake and the others her plan, she has to wonder: is Jake the only one losing touch with their humanity, or has her soul become just as calloused and empty as his?

REVIEW: This is just the sort of plot development that should've come earlier in the series. But, then, these last books feel like a wind sprint through all the stuff Applegate meant to do, but kept putting off to crank out filler plots. Jake comes closer to cracking than ever before, the loss of his whole family driven home by day after day of watching Marco, Cassie, Rachel, and even the orphaned Tobias with their safe-and-sound parents. Cassie wants to believe she's still the same person she used to be before the war, but watching her parents react to her new self drives home her own transformation into someone she doesn't particularly like, but cannot seem to break away from. In the end, Cassie risks everything once she held dear for redemption... even, possibly, her love for Jake. Returning to the internal conflicts and moral dilemmas that were always the strength of the series, The Ultimate demonstrates that the spark is still alive, even fifty-odd books later.

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The Absolute
(The Animorphs series, Book 51)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
****

DESCRIPTION: Marco and Tobias were monitoring suspicious troop movements near town, a possible indication of Yeerks manipulating the National Guard, when they ran into trouble: a squadron of peregrine falcons and golden eagles.
Their worst fears realized.
Since Jake's brother Tom escaped with Prince Elfangor's blue cube, the Animorphs are no longer the only morph-capable fighters in this war. Worse, with Visser One's operatives controlling some, if not all, of the guard units, he has military-grade Earth-based firepower and combat-trained human-Controllers at his beck and call. The invasion's about to go public.
Which means the Animorphs have to do the same.
While Jake and the others distract the Yeerk-controlled National Guard, Marco, Tobias, and Ax head to the state capitol. Their plan? Warn the governor about the Yeerks before they can slip a slug into her brain. Only she has the authority to call in more guards, or send for help from the Pentagon... too far away from the Yeerk pool for Visser One to have reached. If nothing else, it's time the general public knew what was going on - before the Dracon beams of Yeerk Bug fighters start carving up the city streets in broad daylight. Of course, they have to dodge Controllers - in morph and out of it - to reach her, but with only three members, they should have no problem with stealth.
The operative word, unfortunately, being "should"...

REVIEW: A high-action thrill ride, this book creates an interesting dynamic by splitting the core group. Without Jake to lead them, Marco and the others can't turn to anyone else to make decisions for them. Fortunately, they're veterans in this war by now; the Animorphs of even twenty books ago wouldn't have been able to function as smoothly on their own. In the governor, the Animorphs may at last have found a grown-up who can handle the news of alien invaders - if they can keep her alive and uninfested long enough to do them any good. With only three books left in the series, both Animorphs and Yeerks prepare themselves for the upcoming final showdown, the ultimate battle for the fate of the Earth.
Incidentally, it's long been apparent, but these later books' titles really must be the result of some sort of random word generator... there's no reason for this one, of all the books, to be called the "absolute" anything.
And on another note, I cannot believe how high the prices are for these later Animorphs installments... check your local library for a much more economical option, unless you're planning to collect them all.

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The Sacrifice
(The Animorphs series, Book 52)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
****

DESCRIPTION: Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill, younger brother of the hero Prince Elfangor, has lived and fought with the Animorphs since they rescued him from the wreckage of the Andalite Dome ship. He has come to respect humans, even - occasionally - admire them. He has stood beside "Prince Jake," against every law and custom of the Andalite people, who hold themselves above and apart from even their allies. Like Elfangor before him, Ax thought he might live and die for Earth, his human comrades-in-arms at his side.
But, as the face of the war has changed, his friends have changed with it... in ways that confuse and frighten him.
Once a unified group, now the pressures of the Yeerk war turn them against each other. Even Jake can't seem to hold the Earth resistance together. In desperation, Ax has taken to covertly contacting his Andalite superiors. They have a strong leadership, and a firm plan for Earth... a plan that essentially uses humans as bait to lure Yeerks to their doom, when the fleet annihilates every living thing from the planet's surface. The sacrifice of one backwards, divided, antagonistic species to save the galaxy from the Yeerk threat.
Now, Jake and his friends have learned that the Yeerks have tapped into the city's subway system, mass-infesting hordes of new hosts every day. They mean to destroy the new tunnels... and the Yeerk pool. A devastating attack that could break Visser One's stranglehold on the planet - and doom the Andalight High Command's plans.
Stand with his prince, or obey his people? Help the Animorphs destroy untold numbers of Yeerks, or sabotage their efforts? Wherever he looks, Ax finds only bad choices, and no answers.

REVIEW: Once more, Aximili must look himself in the eye and decide where he stands... only this time, the stakes are higher and the choices nowhere near as clear-cut as they used to be. His friends are not the same people he once swore to stand beside, and the war is no longer a covert cat-and-mouse game in the shadows. Learning of Cassie's terrible choice in The Ultimate (Book 50), the choice that gave morphing technology to the Yeerks, only makes things that much harder... especially when he hears her reasons, reasons that are either childishly naive or bravely forward-thinking. The Animorphs begin pulling themselves back together for the final two books, with a fatalistic sense of impending resolution. One way or another, this war will end soon, and in these final books the Animorphs are, in their own ways, making peace with who they are and what they've become.
On an unrelated note, the editing on some of these later books is downright sloppy, with thought-speech brackets and spoken-speech quotation marks terribly intermixed. I hope they take the time to clear that up when they finally get around to "updating" them... which, at the rate Scholastic is going, should coincide with the completion of the first manned trip to Mars.

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The Answer
(The Animorphs series, Book 53)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
*****

DESCRIPTION: Three years.
Three years, since Jake and his friends took the shortcut through the old construction site. Three years since the dying Prince Elfangor told them of the secret Yeerk invasion. Three years since five human children and one Andalite warrior-cadet joined forces to defend the world, using all the power of the animal kingdom.
Now, the secrecy is over. The Yeerk pool under the city lies in ruins, but Visser One has only stepped up his campaign of open warfare. To feed his people with vital Kandrona rays, he has landed the massive Pool ship. This is it: the heart of the invasion force. A battleship to dwarf the strength of the Visser's own Blade ship.
It's a target too big, too tempting, for Jake and his companions to resist... but impossible for them to take.
Or so they thought.
While disrupting construction of a new Earth-based Yeerk pool, Jake discovers a secret group of rebels within the Yeerk ranks, in the most unlikely of places. The Taxxons, giant cannibalistic centipedes, want out of their lopsided alliance with the Yeerks. If the Animorphs will help them, the Taxxons claim they can deliver the keys to the Pool ship.
Jake has a target. He has a plan - a ruthless, terrible plan, a plan that the old Jake, that thirteen-year-old boy standing in the construction site, could never have believed himself capable of devising, let alone executing. It might end up with one or more of his friends dead. It might get every resistance fighter on Earth - the newest Animorphs, the free Hork-Bajir, the parents of his friends, the last of the Yeerk-free military, everyone - killed.
But it's the last - the only - chance for victory. And Jake isn't about to let it slip through his fingers.
No matter what the cost...

REVIEW: And so, at last, it comes to end-game. Though there is one more book in the series, the actual final battle begins - and mostly plays out - in these pages. The levity of the earlier Animorphs books has almost entirely dissipated; these are no longer kids, but war-weary soldiers who finally see the end in sight. Jake has transformed from a reluctant leader beset by inner doubts to a ruthless general capable of issuing orders that are tantamount to suicide... orders that may twist in his gut, but which he issues nonetheless. By this point, he knows his allies and his enemies inside and out, placing them with all the care and deliberation of a chess master setting his opponent up for the ultimate checkmate. It is the sort of character transformation one rarely sees even in grown-up fiction, let alone middle-grade series. The month-long wait for the conclusion in Book 54 was excruciating... a wait, fortunately, I don't have to replicate now.

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The Beginning
(The Animorphs series, Book 54)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
****+

DESCRIPTION: Once, they were five human children and one Andalite warrior-cadet, hidden warriors fighting to save Earth from an invisible, parasitic threat. Fighting the foul Abomination, the sole Andalite-Controller in the galaxy. Fighting the animal minds of their own morphed bodies. Fighting their own inexperience, their own doubts and fears.
Three years later, the secrecy is gone. The Yeerk war is over.
And, in the final, terrible battle, six became five.
Now, after years of fighting, of fear, of making soul-scarring decisions no sentient, feeling being should be forced to make, the surviving Animorphs find themselves thrust into the international - and interplanetary - spotlight. Hailed as heroes, mobbed by fans, courted by politicians, and targeted by terrorists, Jake and his companions face their greatest challenge ever: the beginning of the rest of their lives. It should be a time of relief, of joy, of hope. But the old scars linger, as do the old warrior instincts. For not all of the Yeerks surrendered at the end of the war... and so long as the rebel Blade ship remains free, interplanetary peace may be just a temporary illusion.

REVIEW: I remember the hammer-blow to the gut I felt the first time I read The Beginning. Realistically, Applegate could've ended the story of the Animorphs with one or two more chapters at the end of Book 53. Most authors would have. Instead, she chose a more challenging, more honest route, giving readers a look at the lives faced by war veterans and other survivors. Jake and his friends each became nothlits in their own ways, morphed into soldiers by the necessities of war only to find - at the end - that they had overstayed the limit, and could no longer demorph into the innocent children they used to be. It takes the concept of the series to a whole different level, and provides a more realistic portrayal of after-the-victory life than most books dare. The ending... well, Applegate caught a lot of flak from fans. I admit, I wasn't too keen on it the first time, myself. But, in rereading the books, I don't think she could've done justice to the characters or the series had she let things lie where most people would have, in the happy honeymoon glow of war's end. Jake and his friends had been too deeply changed, too deeply wounded in heart and mind, for such a happy-taffy send-off. (Even the little page-corner morphs - a feature of the books, where you flip the pages to see them morph - give the Animorphs a proper send-off, with the profiles of the characters fading to nothing.)
In the afterword at the end of the book, Applegate explains why she ended it how she did. She explains that it was time to walk away from the Animorphs world. There's enough meat left on the bones, enough lingering loose strings, that she could easily revisit the universe in the future... but I don't expect she ever will. She told the story she wanted to tell. And, on the whole, she did it brilliantly.
In the end, I was left with a few regrets. I regret the unnecessary extensions and filler books, not to mention the uneven quality of the ghostwriters, that kept the story from advancing as smoothly as it should have. I regret not being able to spend more time getting to know the newer Animorphs and other allies from the final phase of the war. I regret never knowing the answers to some of the nagging stray threads left over from earlier adventures. But mostly I regret that I'll probably never read its like again... not even from K. A. Applegate (whose Everworld series ended on a strong note, but whose Remnants series petered out disappointingly.) For five years, the Animorphs series provided me (and my father and mother, both of whom swiped my books as soon as I finished) with a monthly fix of action, adventure, and the occasional burst of humor. I always knew they were treasures, but not until I reread them did I realize just what rare jewels they truly were.
So, Applegate, if you're reading this, I offer a belated and heart-felt "thank you." (And a profound wish that you are, somehow, overseeing the "updates"... it would be a shame if the magic was lost for future generations.)

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