Month: August 2020

This book faces a lot of the real issues. For once the conflicts seem more realistic than usual. SPOILERS if you haven\’t read this far in the series! 

Much better. Nice balance between action-packed and heart-tugging. Some parts still made me roll my eyes, and there were quite a few typos in my e-reader version, but oh well. Warning for MAJOR SPOILERS! 

    Two plotlines in this one. The valley of free Hork-bajir is discovered by the enemy, and the Animorphs scramble to deal with that. They want to relocate the colony but the Hork-bajir refuse, insist on standing their ground and fighting even though they are hugely outnumbered. Marco\’s parents are oddly uninvolved in the planning- I got the impression they were just standing around in the background looking stoic. They never said anything! Anyway, at least there\’s a new interesting morph in this book- beaver. Part of the plan is to expand a beaver dam they found upstream, so it will hold back enough water that when they break the dam it will flood the valley and wipe out the enemy. Although the amount of time they had between completing the dam work and releasing the flood, didn\’t seem enough to me, to build up the volume of water they needed. I don\’t know. 

     Things are moving quickly now. Politics have shifted among the alien Yeerks, the new Visser running the show blatantly attacks. No more subtletry. Luckily the Animorphs have this device Ax built (with a nod to Marco\’s father assisting) that can intercept the alien communication signals. They find out something big is going to happen out in the ocean. They steal a fighter jet to get there on time, deliberately crash it when they\’re close to the location- because of course they\’re being persued and about to be shot down. Find a very large, very busy aircraft carrier which they board as seagulls but before long are using their animal battle forms and even morphing other people (except Cassie who objects), without bothering to hide much. It doesn\’t matter anymore. They discover that the Yeerks are on the verge of instigating World War III, for their own ends. (Why the enemy just tells them his plans when they ask, I just don\’t know). There\’s fighting everywhere. Ax- the narrator in this book- who for all this time in the series has been subordinate to Jake, never much taking his own initiative- suddenly makes a decisive move to force the enemy\’s hand. But it could also endanger thousands of human lives. Driving another rift between the Animorphs, perhaps. Cassie doesn\’t say much in this book, and I\’m with her. When all the others are talking over details of the fighter jets and the aircraft carrier (Jake knows a lot about its layout, helpfully) she just doesn\’t relate. Same here. So that was kinda a blur. Interesting to see that when the fight gets serious- Hork-bajir troops showing up to fight for the Yeerks- some of the sailors and Marines decide they\’re on the side of these animal-shifting kids. They must be in the know about the aliens and wanted to see resistance all along? Curious to see how that pans out in the next few books, maybe finally the Animorphs will have numbers on their side, instead of being a small secretive team.

Arkham Reviews 

Opening scene has the Animorphs involved in a shoot-out between a few Marines and a bunch of enemy Yeerk controllers at the airport, because a piece of wreckage from a alien fighter ship was found and who\’s going to have it. Cassie gets caught in the middle, nearly killed, escapes by morphing a fly and hiding in some luggage, winds up on a plane headed to Australia. The Yeerks attack and there\’s a crash and she\’s lost in the desert. She morphs again to escape safely, but is witnessed by an Aboriginal boy nearby. He\’s not at all surprised, because his traditional beliefs lead him to readily accept people having powers to change into animals. Really? This made me a bit uncomfortable. So. Cassie gets sheltered by the Aboriginal family, and makes a plan to get back home. The outstation radio was destroyed by Yeerks, so Cassie is going to travel as kangaroo overnight (too hot during the day, even as a native animal) to the nearest place where she can use a phone. But the boy\’s grandfather gets a leg injury that develops into a terrible infection alarmingly fast, and Cassie and the boy perform an amputation. Even for a sci-fi book in a series that really stretches reality, this was too much for me. There\’s other adults in the community, even one who is a healer- and it\’s two relatively inexperienced kids who perform an emergency operation? Um, no. Description of that was very unsettling, too. 

Tobias finds a kid lost in the forest and he leads the rescue team to the spot where the kid is trapped- by speaking to the father- as a hawk! Of course this exposes him, and before he realizes what\’s happening, he\’s been attacked by a bald eagle then put in a cage in a wildlife veterinary clinic, and accosted by the enemy alien soldiers on all sides when they break into the place at night. His friends try to save him but then -strangely- a Yeerk controller named Taylor steps in- she\’s the one who tormented Tobias in the past. She claims to have a plan to destroy Visser Three and hundreds of Yeerks in one fell swoop- says she\’s part of a Yeerk rebellion against what they see as failing leadership, as an explanation.