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The Weakness

Animorphs #37
by K.A. Applegate

Wow, it\’s been a long time. I didn\’t really feel like reading Animorphs again, but my other current read is a tough book- so I need breaks between chapters, and this happens to be a good alternative, in an odd way. Turns out I read half of The Weakness months and months ago, then put it down and forgot about it. Don\’t remember why. Skimmed a bit to remind myself of the storyline, but didn\’t bother to re-read entire chapters again. Jake is absent so the team decides to put Rachel in charge when a report comes in of discovering the Visser\’s secret feeding spot. They can\’t pass up the opportunity to try and get the enemy. Rachel is all for just trying to chase him down (using a new cheetah morph) but of course they fail. Also meet a new alien creature, the only good thing here being that the Visser and this new enemy the Inspector appear to despise each other, which is to the Animorphs\’ advantage. Then they decide to rush around town storming different shops and locations one after the other making it appear that they have much larger numbers than in reality, so the Visser will look bad in front of the Inspector. Causing a lot of conspicuous damage and probably hurting innocent people (not like them at all). Then to bash in on a meeting of high-up Controllers, all of them using polar bear form instead of their usual battle morphs. It goes badly. Cassie gets captured and almost forced into the Yeerk pool. The others barely save her in time- using bird of prey morphs and one cobra. They pretty much only escape because when Marco-as-cobra takes the Inspector down, the Visser and all his underlings just stand there staring, instead of grabbing the Animorphs who are exhausted and injured. All these frenetic attacks without much planning were Rachel\’s push, but she has doubts the whole time and feels terrible about putting her friends in danger and afterwards when Jake returns asks him: how do you do it? how can you stand to make those decisions, putting your friends\’ lives on the line? He flinches for a moment then closes it off and says: I just don\’t think about it. Well, I could have done without all the hectic nonsense fighting scenes, but the ending had a more serious note.

Rating: 2/5 144 pages, 1999

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Tags: 2/5- Just Okay, Animals Fiction, Current Reads, Fantasy / Sci Fi, Juvenile Fic

The Mutation

Animorphs #36
by K.A. Applegate

Terrible. Ridiculous plot, which I could go along with, except the writing was so poor I just couldn\’t. In a nutshell- the enemy aliens built a submarine ship called the Sea Blade in order to access a hidden underground resource they shouldn\’t have, and then experimented on making Hork-Bajir amphibious in order to use them to get there. The Hork-Bajir the Animorphs find are so tortured that they vow revenge, and also have to keep the enemy from their goal, of course. So they morph orcas (also whales and sharks at different points) and dive in the ocean at first to just physically try and damage the Sea Blade. Then they find an underwater civilization that has taken sunken ships captive for thousands of years, making a sort of display gallery out of all their preserved crew members. They get trapped by the undersea people and have to cleverly escape, which also means, in the end, making a deal with Visser Three so they can all get out alive together. Because he\’s down there trapped in the Sea Blade.

It\’s pretty bad when the first scene is so poorly written I didn\’t understand at all why the Animorphs were feeling vengeful. Even with the way they could change morphs to avoid death while battling the aliens underwater against the Sea Blade, the injuries they took were so horrific I just don\’t see how any of them made it. The premise of how the aquatic civilization had come to exist, and how the Animorphs figured it all out made no sense. Many scenes in the book were so badly described I had no idea what was actually happening, or how the Animorphs reached the conclusions they did. The part where they collaborate with their worst enemy to escape together was so eye-rolling I was skimming at that point and didn\’t care any more how nonsensical it was.

I\’m deleting this one from my e-reader. It seems to have no relation to the rest of the series, so doesn\’t matter and I definitely don\’t want to waste time reading it again.

Rating: 1/5 160 pages, 1999

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VISSER

by K.A. Applegate

Another good one! Like The Andalite Chronicles, it fills in a ton of backstory about the Yeerks invading Earth. This one jumps around between the present narrative and the past, because it\’s Visser One being on trial for multiple counts of treason, and having to explain herself- recounting how the Yeerk Edriss first discovered Earth and realized humans might make good host species, how they took their first hosts to explore the possibilities and learn about humans, how the Sharing was initially set up, how Edriss and her companion Yeerk went through several different hosts until Edriss ended up in Marco\’s mom, and so on. Half of this is Edriss simply telling it, the other half is \”memory transfers\” where everyone gets to view exactly what went on, revealing some details Edriss would have rather kept secret. All the time Visser Three is there- goading her and spouting anger and at risk of being put on trial himself, as Visser One takes every opportunity to point out his mistakes. At one point someone dumps a tiger and a bear into the group- as a distraction?- to make them think it\’s the Animorphs but later someone let the actual Animorphs know where they are and they face a real attack. It was actually cool to see the Animorphs through their enemies\’ eyes. Also to see how humans appeared to them- kind of a character study on the human race. As in The Departure, this one lets the reader see things from the other side, making Visser One not exactly sympathetic, but definitely more of a gray character- you can see why she was driven to do the things she did, but she readily displays her ruthlessness- for all she appears to have developed fond feelings for humankind (living among them in disguise for over a year before any more Yeerks came to Earth), she has no qualms about killing children to meet her ends (and that\’s just one example). Visser Three, on the other hand, remains thoroughly himself the whole time in this book- angry and blustering and bloodthirsty. Not one of the funnier books, but definitely intriguing and laid a lot of things out. Incidentally it was difficult at some points to tell who was talking, or who could hear whom using thought-speak though, when the narrating Visser One was communicating with her host or someone else, or they were in one of the memory replays- but I skimmed past some of that muddle regardless. As a trial it\’s all one huge farce, because in the end the Vissers evade the death penalty and carry on- with some warnings is all. If you\’re interested, do check out some of the other reviews I linked to below. Some of them go into a lot more detail than I cover here.

Rating: 4/5 220 pages, 1999

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Tags: 4/5- Great Book, Current Reads, Fantasy / Sci Fi, Young Adult

The Proposal

Animorphs #35

by K.A. Applegate

This was one of the light ones. Stupid, ridiculous and pointless maybe, but funny as heck. The Animorphs find out that some famous guy is using his television presence to promote the Sharing- which could of course rope tons more innocent humans into being Yeerks, so they have to stop him. They use squirrel morphs (which sounded fun, I wish they\’d spent more time as squirrels) to sneak into his mansion, and then morph cockatiels to fly around undetected, as the guy has a huge bird collection he lets free roam his house. I liked that it was difficult for them to actually put their hands on the birds in order to acquire them- that\’s pretty realistic. (Side note: I thought surely cockateils don\’t say \”twooit\” but I looked up a video of one screaming and yeah, they do kind of sound like that!) So they find out this guy is kind of unhinged but keeps his cover by pretending to be kind and love animals, as the human host does. They decide to use animal morphs to antagonize him in public so people will see him acting violently towards animals and it will ruin his image. All kinds of ridiculous hijinks ensue. Of course half the plans go wrong. Especially because Marco is suffering from extreme stress- not only due to the ongoing alien warfare but also because his father is dating a woman without realizing Marco\’s mother might still be alive. So now Marco randomly looses control of his morphs, becoming a meld of two animals at once- the spider/skunk one was pretty alarming- and he doesn\’t tell his friends about it at first. They all find out pretty quick, though. In the end, Marco morphs his father\’s girlfriend\’s poodle (which he detests) and uses it to continually harass the guy until he goes berserk in the tv studio, they catch it on live film and success! but only just barely managing to avoid blowing their own cover, of course. Through all this, Cassie shows a lot of compassion towards Marco trying to help him talk through his angst about his father\’s situation, and about the war in general- she\’s got some pretty levelheaded advice, too. Don\’t dwell on what should or shouldn\’t have happened in the past. Deal with what\’s happening right now. Although all her talking doesn\’t really help- it\’s Jake yelling at Marco to pull himself together that does it at the end.

Incidentally, I found out how long it actually takes me to read a 150 page book when I am completely uninterrupted (on a long flight): just about three hours.

Rating: 3/5 147 pages, 1999

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Tags: 3/5- Good Read, Animals Fiction, Current Reads, Fantasy / Sci Fi, Juvenile Fic

The Prophecy

Animorphs #34
by K.A. Applegate

This was one of the better Animorphs books for me. I really liked all the ethical and morality questions it raised. It starts with a dash of humor- Cassie and Rachel using animal morphs to sneak into a teacher\’s house and retrieve a piece of homework that had \”Cassie loves Jake\” doodled on it, haha. Then a Hork-Bajir shows up: the free Hork-Bajir in the hidden valley have been approached by the last surviving Arn, that species that invented the Hork-Bajir so long ago. He wants their help to use DNA samples from the Hork-Bajir to create more of them to fight the Yeerks, and also to find a cache of weapons on the Hork-Bajir home planet. The Animorphs are brought in as consultants because the Hork-Bajir with their lesser intelligence don\’t understand all the implications. Winds up that they all travel back to that planet to find the weapons, but first they have to get the spirit of Aldrea- whose memory and personality was \”backed up\” or saved in some kind of device- because only she knows where the cache might be. This is weird and corny, but after Aldrea enters someone\’s mind- happens she chooses Cassie- it gets really interesting. Some other reviewers refer to this as the book where Cassie is possessed by an alien ghost, but I didn\’t see it that way at all. Once Aldrea was sharing Cassie\’s body, it was far more reminiscent of how the Yeerks take over their hosts- a fact which the Animorphs did not miss. Cassie actually struggles as Aldrea tries to wrest some control from her- because she has her own ideas, of course. There\’s some really interesting interactions between Aldrea and Ax- both being Andalites after all- Ax can\’t help looking down on Aldrea for her choices, they both have a huge helping of arrogance about everything, and Ax scorns Aldrea for her connections to Seerow (who first gave the Yeerks superior knowledge they weren\’t ready to handle) but Aldrea points out that Elfangor did the exact same thing to the human teenagers, so who\’s judging? Aside from all that, there\’s this impossible mission they have to pull off because the weapons cache is under a Yeerk pool, Aldrea is horrified to see how her home planet has been ravaged by the Yeerks, and Toby (the Horjk-Bajir who came to get help) sees her ancestral home planet for the first time, then doesn\’t want to return to Earth. The morphing scenes were crazy. Cassie\’s ability with this really shines, and Aldrea\’s admiration for it (and moment of shock at how the Animorphs are actually utilizing the morphing technology to thwart the Yeerks) is really something, coming from the race that invented it. Lots of heavy stuff. I liked it.

This one seems to be a continuation of The Hork-Bajir Chronicles. Had a copy of this on my e-reader.

Rating: 4/5 141 pages, 1999

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Tags: 4/5- Great Book, Animals Fiction, Current Reads, Fantasy / Sci Fi, Juvenile Fic

The Illusion

Animorphs #33
by K.A. Applegate

(There may be SPOILERS). The Animorphs team are trying to find out where the Anti-Morphing weapon is hidden, so they sneak into a large event of The Sharing. While there Ax causes some ruckus because he gets carried away with tasting food (introducing some humor once more). They decide to deliberately let Tobias get captured so that when the new weapon is tested, the enemy will think it simply doesn\’t work (because of course the hawk is Tobias\’ true form). The plan is that Rachel will sneak along with Tobias as a fly, return to let the team know where they are, and bring them all back to save Tobias and destroy the weapon. Only things go wrong. Tobias ends up being held captive and tortured for most of the book. It\’s very vivid. Especially the wandering and agony his mind goes through. The reader learns a lot about bad times in his past, as he revists them. Finally he retreats into the mind of the hawk, which just suffers the pain not understanding it, and gives up thinking he\’s going to die. Of course the team crashes in just at the last minute and manages to save Tobias, in a very confusing and gruesome battle, but it leaves them all incredibly shook up. Tobias wonders about how Jake- as the leader- has been deliberately using him, and Rachel expresses her true feelings, plus all the awkwardness in their relationship. Tobias goes through all this after having faced (earlier in the story) some glum moments feeling awkward when he\’s in human form to be with Rachel, and realizing that a hawk has a naturally short life span. . . . In addition to all this, there\’s some equally grim stuff when the torturer reveals to Tobias some of her own backstory- what led her to actually become a voluntary host to an alien Yeerk. Oh, and there\’s a deeper connection bonding between Tobias and Ax, as in part of the plan to fool the enemy, Tobias acquires the Andalite so he can take the form the enemy expects him to. I don\’t know why the Animorphs haven\’t all acquired Andalite morphs before this point- it would be incredibly useful! Anyway, this is all a jumble, as I\’m rather tired, but it was such an intense story, don\’t really feel like this one fits in the juvenile fiction category either, due to the torture scenes. (During which there\’s there\’s a strong reference to the Princess Bride Pit of Despair- a few other reviwers noticed that as well). As a side note, there were numerous small typos in the copy I read- I don\’t know if it\’s just the e-book version or not.

Rating: 3/5 156 pages, 1999

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Tags: 3/5- Good Read, Animals Fiction, Current Reads, Fantasy / Sci Fi, Young Adult

The Separation

Animorphs #32
by K.A. Applegate

Warning for possible SPOILERS as this is pretty far into the series. Rachel\’s falling apart, seems to be experiencing some pretty bad PTSD. She\’s jumpy, easily angered, and does some stupid stuff, morphs a starfish on a field trip within view of other kids in order to retrieve her earring from a tide pool. Being a starfish didn\’t last long- a kid comes along with a shovel and chops starfish/Rachel in half. In a panic Rachel morphs back to human, avoiding death- but now there\’s two of her. With two different parts of her personality, and two different parts of her brain. She\’s impossible to work with- one side of her being indecisive and timid, the other incredibly volatile and violent. While trying to deal with the Rachel issue, the Animorphs also have to find out where the enemy is keeping a secret weapon that could defeat their morphing abilities. They don\’t want the two Rachels involved, but they need the Nice Rachel along to have enough numbers to cover all the bases and can\’t avoid the other as Mean Rachel is furious at being left behind. Luckily in the scramble to avoid disaster when (of course) they confront the enemy in the final scenes, the two Rachels realize they need each other to be whole and functional (Mean Rachel does so very grudgingly) and with some help from the Chee, the Animorphs are able to fuse the two halves of Rachel back into one. There were -as always- some completely ridiculous situations, but for the most part I found this one interesting. Seems like the Animorphs are using their abilities more cleverly, too- not always barging into the fray with large, dangerous morphs but using the small ones to be sneaky and pose a threat from the inside. I liked that. (This book is on my e-reader).

Rating: 3/5 158 pages, 1999

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Tags: 3/5- Good Read, Animals Fiction, Current Reads, Fantasy / Sci Fi, Juvenile Fic

The Conspiracy

Animorphs #31
by K.A. Applegate

Note that there might be SPOILERS if you haven\’t read so far in the series. This one kind of has the same premise as the previous book– one of the Animorphs has to face a terrible dilemma: protect his family or keep the Animorphs from being exposed. It\’s Jake. His great-grandfather has died so they\’re all leaving town for funeral arrangements- which will take four or more days. His brother Tom\’s Yeerk is panicked at being away from its source of nutrients too long- it will die. Their father refuses to let Tom stay behind, so after several different attempts to thwart events, the Yeerk in Tom is plotting to do away with his father. Jake has to stop him without letting Tom realize that he\’s an Animorph. A lot of this one is focused on Jake\’s family interactions, his fear for Tom and hatred of the Yeerk controlling him, his inability to be ruthless like Marco was about the similar situation with his mother/Visser One. There\’s also conflict within the Animorphs team, who makes the decisions, can they override their leader. Jake\’s futile plan to simply keep twenty-four-seven surveillence on his father until the weekend is over fails; luckily his friends step in and save the day with their own crazy plan. It\’s a bit of a stretch to think that Marco as a gorilla bashing cars around in a parking lot would have no reactions from the public (although the illustration inside the cover showed it being cars parking on a curb with passerby right there, I pictured it being a mostly-empty parking lot, all the shoppers being indoors until after the incident) and that Rachel as a grizzly, Jake as a rhino and Marco as gorilla again wouldn\’t get noticed by any neighbors when they smash through Chapman\’s house to take him hostage as a distraction to the enemy! Ridiculous and reckless. In spite of that, I was able to enjoy the story this time. I didn\’t notice any new morphs, they all used familiar ones- including birds of prey, cockroach and tiger- and that\’s part of the series I always really liked- seeing how they felt inside new animal skins and dealing with the instincts and sharp senses- but now it\’s getting more intense with the stakes even higher in the alien conflict so I still like reading them.

Rating: 3/5 139 pages, 1999

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Tags: 3/5- Good Read, Animals Fiction, Current Reads, Fantasy / Sci Fi, Juvenile Fic

The Reunion

Animorphs #30
by K.A. Applegate

Ah, this one didn\’t work for me. Maybe I wasn\’t in the right reading mood. Maybe because it\’s been so long since the last Animorphs read, I didn\’t really recall what was going on. Oddly enough, this book jumps straight into the storyline without the usual recap, but it was so awkward at first. Please note there are SPOILERS below if you haven\’t read this far in the series.

So Marco skips school and walks downtown, running into Visser One (his mother) in disguise, so of course he follows her and uses morphs (in a very risky way) to get into the office she \’works\’ at and almost gets caught but doesn\’t and tells the other Animorphs what he\’s discovered and they go back the next day as a team. The confrontation is a mess of course but they learn that Visser Three has his forces following Visser One, having convinced their council that\’s she\’s a traitor and obtained a warrant to execute her. The Animorphs see an opportunity now to do away with either one or both of the Vissers, but Marco is dealing with some serious internal conflict: protect the Visser One who is his mom as a controller, or take the opportunity to kill her, as one of their greatest enemies. Marco decides to plow ahead with a plan to trick the two Vissers into fighting with each other- and for some reason his friends go along with this. In a nutshell it entails taking Visser One up the mountain in disguise leading her to think she\’s going to wipe out the hidden Hork-Bajir colony meanwhile Visser Three and his forces are following behind and yes there\’s a showdown on a mountain top that is only partly actually there- because the Hork-Bajir valley is actually a hologram to trick Visser One- and it\’s Marco who attacks Visser One but Jake knocks him aside and even though she falls off the mountainside it appears she may have survived. Marco, needless to say, is a mess. He goes home and zones out in front of the television for days.

A lot of it feels infused with anger and confusion (on Marco\’s part). The plan was never clear to the reader, only as it unfolded. The new morph in this book was mountain goat, by the way. A lot of things are mentioned only once and briefly, then left entirely up to the reader\’s imagination- such as when an underling angers Visser Three who instantly chops his arm off. The limb falls to the ground, and the narrative immediately moves on to someone talking- there\’s no description of bleeding, or fainting, or the maimed person screaming or anything. Just oh, his arm is gone now!

Um, I\’m going to read two or three more here and if I\’m getting the same vibe it will be an indication to take another long break and read something different for a while. Had this one on my e-reader.

Rating: 2/5 pages, 1999

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Tags: 2/5- Just Okay, Animals Fiction, Current Reads, Fantasy / Sci Fi, Juvenile Fic

Elfangor\’s Secret

Megamorphs #3
by K.A. Applegate

In this Megamorph- longer than the usual books in the Animorph series- one of the alien leaders, Visser Four, has got hold of a dangerous device called the Time Matrix. It allows him to travel through time and change events in history. The Animorph team get a jarring view of how this could drastically change reality in the opening scene. They are granted the ability to follow Visser Four through time, in a desperate attempt to prevent him from changing history. Problem is, they don\’t know what events he\’s trying to alter, and what exactly they can do to stop him. They find themselves, at various points, on a French battlefield, in a naval war, with George Washington crossing the Deleware and on the beaches at D-Day, among other points. All significant, pivotal moments and the details are horrific. The chapters are told in alternating points of view. Ax is shaken by what he sees- are humans worth saving from the Yeerks, he wonders, if they are capable of such brutalities as the Holocaust? Also for the first time they face death that is not easily shaken off by morphing. One of the main characters, I thought until the last chapter, had actually been lost forever. The complications and problems with time-travel was, I thought, well-considered in a book aimed at children. Although I agree with another viewer this book boarders on YA not juvenile fiction. So much warfare, explosions, terrible injuries, vicious quick decisions made by some you would not expect (Cassie, for one). At one point a character escapes seeing what\’s going on by morphing into a fly, at another part of the story someone morphs a dolphin in the river and decides it might be better to swim away and stay dolphin permanently. But in the end, they do manage to thwart the enemy, and regain control of the device- in a strange scene of altered history where Hitler was a mere driver for someone higher-up, but Tobias felt compelled to execute him anyway. It feels like this series just got a lot more serious.

Rating: 4/5 224 pages, 1999

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Tags: 4/5- Great Book, Animals Fiction, Fantasy / Sci Fi, Juvenile Fic

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