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juushikaTitle: The Discovery (Animorphs Book 20)
Author: K.A. Applegate
Published: Scholastic, 1998
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 155
Total Page Count: 295,285
Text Number: 972
Read Because: reading the series
Review: It may be weird to say, given that nothing goes right, but this is satisfying competence porn—the failures are due to a difficult situation, not poor communication or lazy writing; everyone is distinct and able, with a strong but complicated group dynamic. David is meant to be awful, and he is, but not always in the right way: the conflict he creates within the Animorphs is engaging, but his conflict with Marco (our PoV) and the reader's sensibilities is just unpleasant. Atwo three-part narrative is such a change of pace! The series is far enough along there's room for it, even within its (sort of hilariously pointless) attempt to make each installment comprehensible out of context, but it still feels out of place.
Title: The Threat (Animorphs Book 21)
Author: K.A. Applegate
Published: Scholastic, 1998
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 160
Total Page Count: 295,445
Text Number: 973
Read Because: reading the series
Review: An ongoing arc continues to feel strange, but I think I like it; it's both a more complex narrative and more manipulative and tropey in its pacing, so: about how I'd expect this series to mature. I appreciate Jake's PoV at this point, because a leader's view of the Animorphs competence porn vs. an impossibly difficult situation brings out the best of both parts. David is also better here—less exaggerated and frustrating in characterization, more convincingly antagonistic. The larger Yeerk plot is the weakness. It has good scale, but plotholes like "did no one check the date?" combine with Visser Three's hammy villainy to feel vaguely ridiculous.
(I feel like most people who read this series as a kid have a "that time someone almost got trapped in morph" which has always stuck with them—and Marco, Cassie, and the dog-sized flea was mine. And what good taste young me had! because it's still harrowing & affecting.)
Title: The Solution (Animorphs Book 22)
Author: K.A. Applegate
Published: Scholastic, 1998
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 150
Total Page Count: 295,630
Text Number: 975
Read Because: reading the series
Review:What a strong end to this arc! It handles the Yeerk subplot better than the previous two books, but the real success is Rachel. She's had good books, but her PoV characterization has been inconsistent and plagued by poor communication/bad decisions; her throughline of increasingly reckless violence has largely been seen from the outside. Here it's front and center, and confronted by a target more personal but also less amorphous than the Yeerks. It dovetails beautifully with this antagonist, and with Jake's PoV in the previous book and the moral ambiguity of his leadership. The escalation in tone from euphemism to fact, "No, not destroy. That was a weasel word. It was vague, meaningless. I was going to kill him," is inevitable yet somehow still startling. The only weakness is David, who's lost some of the sympathy that made him work in the previous book.
(They may have found a non-lethal solution [not that it's ever treated as an easy solution], but here's a reminder that rats in the wild live for less than a year. So: not that non-lethal!)
Title: The Hork-Bajir Chronicles (Animorphs Chronicles Book 2 / Animorphs Book 22.5)
Author: K.A. Applegate
Published: Scholastic, 1998
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 205
Total Page Count: 295,865
Text Number: 977
Read Because: reading the series
Review: This holds no candle to the Andalite Chronicles—it's much more limited, even if what setpieces do exist in the planet's geography are great; it suffers a prequel's curse of predictability, especially without a twist ending of any sort. The Hork-Bajir are inauspicious subjects, and both their depiction as gentle savages and the focus on an intelligent outlier are imperfect solutions to that problem. I still do ship the central couple, but more on principle (I love that there's so many atypical intimacies in this series!) than in practice, as either character grabbed me. So: perfectly adequate, but not memorable. I wonder if my impression would differ had I read this as a kid? (It's definitely one I skipped.)
Also it bugged me an unreasonable amount that Visser Three's obsessive focus on Andalites clashes so much with his idle curiosity in The Andelite Chronicles. Not only is it inconsistent, this retconned character arc is too neat.
Title: The Pretender (Animorphs Book 23)
Author: K.A. Applegate
Published: Scholastic, 1998
Rating: 5 of 5
Page Count: 155
Total Page Count: 296,020
Text Number: 978
Read Because: reading the series
Review: I love a good Tobias book, and this one seems like it must have been particularly fun to write. Applegate seem to have run out of fucks to give—the explicit references to Jake and Cassie's interracial relationship and "hard to imagine humans welcoming seven-foot-tall goblins into the local Boy Scout troop when they couldn't even manage to tolerate some gay kid" are both refreshingly, even startlingly, honest. And this is Tobias at peak woobie. The writing isn't incredibly consistent—Tobias seems to cope well as a supporting character but then has sudden crises when he's a narrator, and Rachel's insistence that the give up the fight seems out of character—but I appreciate it when episodic narratives sideline the A-plot in order to focus on a character's emotional arc, and Tobias's unsolvable, accessible inner turmoil has stuck with me almost word for word since I was thirteen and still holds up as an adult reader. A solid 4.5 star book, bumped up because it made me have an entire feeling.
Title: The Suspicion (Animorphs Book 24)
Author: K.A. Applegate
Published: Scholastic, 1998
Rating: 1 of 5
Page Count: 155
Total Page Count: 296,485
Text Number: 980
Read Because: reading the series
Review: After a heavy three-parter and an angsty Tobias book, it's absolutely time for a one-off comedy adventure; I get it, but I still don't like it, because I have no sense of humor. Issues of personal taste aside, this would be a wash. There's some crazy setpieces here re: being very, very tiny. There's also the suspension of disbelief-defying coincidence of these unlucky kids encountering yet another once in a lifetime event (two alien invasions! multiple time-loops, one of which wasn't even caused by anything alien! "there's a theoretical possibility that this Z-space phenomenon could occur—oh, look at that, it just did.") which are fine when I care about the plot, but when I don't.... And I don't.
Title: The Extreme (Animorphs Book 25)
Author: K.A. Applegate
Published: Scholastic, 1999
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 145
Total Page Count: 296,630
Text Number: 981
Read Because: reading the series
Review: I love the intimate, lonely novels and appreciate putting aside the actiony A-plot to focus on that atmosphere, and not much is more intimate or lonely than a den of shapeshifted wolves shivering through a long Artic night. It works particularly well in Marco's PoV, effectively contrasting his normally humorous voice. Objectively this is nothing special, no particular developments in plot or characterization, but in a long episodic series there's room for smaller, more atmospheric installments.
Some notes:
Author: K.A. Applegate
Published: Scholastic, 1998
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 155
Total Page Count: 295,285
Text Number: 972
Read Because: reading the series
Review: It may be weird to say, given that nothing goes right, but this is satisfying competence porn—the failures are due to a difficult situation, not poor communication or lazy writing; everyone is distinct and able, with a strong but complicated group dynamic. David is meant to be awful, and he is, but not always in the right way: the conflict he creates within the Animorphs is engaging, but his conflict with Marco (our PoV) and the reader's sensibilities is just unpleasant. A
Title: The Threat (Animorphs Book 21)
Author: K.A. Applegate
Published: Scholastic, 1998
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 160
Total Page Count: 295,445
Text Number: 973
Read Because: reading the series
Review: An ongoing arc continues to feel strange, but I think I like it; it's both a more complex narrative and more manipulative and tropey in its pacing, so: about how I'd expect this series to mature. I appreciate Jake's PoV at this point, because a leader's view of the Animorphs competence porn vs. an impossibly difficult situation brings out the best of both parts. David is also better here—less exaggerated and frustrating in characterization, more convincingly antagonistic. The larger Yeerk plot is the weakness. It has good scale, but plotholes like "did no one check the date?" combine with Visser Three's hammy villainy to feel vaguely ridiculous.
(I feel like most people who read this series as a kid have a "that time someone almost got trapped in morph" which has always stuck with them—and Marco, Cassie, and the dog-sized flea was mine. And what good taste young me had! because it's still harrowing & affecting.)
Title: The Solution (Animorphs Book 22)
Author: K.A. Applegate
Published: Scholastic, 1998
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 150
Total Page Count: 295,630
Text Number: 975
Read Because: reading the series
Review:What a strong end to this arc! It handles the Yeerk subplot better than the previous two books, but the real success is Rachel. She's had good books, but her PoV characterization has been inconsistent and plagued by poor communication/bad decisions; her throughline of increasingly reckless violence has largely been seen from the outside. Here it's front and center, and confronted by a target more personal but also less amorphous than the Yeerks. It dovetails beautifully with this antagonist, and with Jake's PoV in the previous book and the moral ambiguity of his leadership. The escalation in tone from euphemism to fact, "No, not destroy. That was a weasel word. It was vague, meaningless. I was going to kill him," is inevitable yet somehow still startling. The only weakness is David, who's lost some of the sympathy that made him work in the previous book.
(They may have found a non-lethal solution [not that it's ever treated as an easy solution], but here's a reminder that rats in the wild live for less than a year. So: not that non-lethal!)
Title: The Hork-Bajir Chronicles (Animorphs Chronicles Book 2 / Animorphs Book 22.5)
Author: K.A. Applegate
Published: Scholastic, 1998
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 205
Total Page Count: 295,865
Text Number: 977
Read Because: reading the series
Review: This holds no candle to the Andalite Chronicles—it's much more limited, even if what setpieces do exist in the planet's geography are great; it suffers a prequel's curse of predictability, especially without a twist ending of any sort. The Hork-Bajir are inauspicious subjects, and both their depiction as gentle savages and the focus on an intelligent outlier are imperfect solutions to that problem. I still do ship the central couple, but more on principle (I love that there's so many atypical intimacies in this series!) than in practice, as either character grabbed me. So: perfectly adequate, but not memorable. I wonder if my impression would differ had I read this as a kid? (It's definitely one I skipped.)
Also it bugged me an unreasonable amount that Visser Three's obsessive focus on Andalites clashes so much with his idle curiosity in The Andelite Chronicles. Not only is it inconsistent, this retconned character arc is too neat.
Title: The Pretender (Animorphs Book 23)
Author: K.A. Applegate
Published: Scholastic, 1998
Rating: 5 of 5
Page Count: 155
Total Page Count: 296,020
Text Number: 978
Read Because: reading the series
Review: I love a good Tobias book, and this one seems like it must have been particularly fun to write. Applegate seem to have run out of fucks to give—the explicit references to Jake and Cassie's interracial relationship and "hard to imagine humans welcoming seven-foot-tall goblins into the local Boy Scout troop when they couldn't even manage to tolerate some gay kid" are both refreshingly, even startlingly, honest. And this is Tobias at peak woobie. The writing isn't incredibly consistent—Tobias seems to cope well as a supporting character but then has sudden crises when he's a narrator, and Rachel's insistence that the give up the fight seems out of character—but I appreciate it when episodic narratives sideline the A-plot in order to focus on a character's emotional arc, and Tobias's unsolvable, accessible inner turmoil has stuck with me almost word for word since I was thirteen and still holds up as an adult reader. A solid 4.5 star book, bumped up because it made me have an entire feeling.
Rachel went into her bald eagle morph. I've seen her do it many times before, of course, but for some reason this time it fascinated me. Is that the right word? No, it mesmerized me.
Rachel is a beautiful girl. She's beautiful in that way you know will last her whole life. She'll be a beautiful woman. But beauty alone isn't that big a thing. What makes Rachel "Rachel" is what's inside.
And watching her morph to eagle was like seeing her soul emerge through her flesh.
Title: The Suspicion (Animorphs Book 24)
Author: K.A. Applegate
Published: Scholastic, 1998
Rating: 1 of 5
Page Count: 155
Total Page Count: 296,485
Text Number: 980
Read Because: reading the series
Review: After a heavy three-parter and an angsty Tobias book, it's absolutely time for a one-off comedy adventure; I get it, but I still don't like it, because I have no sense of humor. Issues of personal taste aside, this would be a wash. There's some crazy setpieces here re: being very, very tiny. There's also the suspension of disbelief-defying coincidence of these unlucky kids encountering yet another once in a lifetime event (two alien invasions! multiple time-loops, one of which wasn't even caused by anything alien! "there's a theoretical possibility that this Z-space phenomenon could occur—oh, look at that, it just did.") which are fine when I care about the plot, but when I don't.... And I don't.
Title: The Extreme (Animorphs Book 25)
Author: K.A. Applegate
Published: Scholastic, 1999
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 145
Total Page Count: 296,630
Text Number: 981
Read Because: reading the series
Review: I love the intimate, lonely novels and appreciate putting aside the actiony A-plot to focus on that atmosphere, and not much is more intimate or lonely than a den of shapeshifted wolves shivering through a long Artic night. It works particularly well in Marco's PoV, effectively contrasting his normally humorous voice. Objectively this is nothing special, no particular developments in plot or characterization, but in a long episodic series there's room for smaller, more atmospheric installments.
Some notes:
- Yeah, I did it, I gave another Animorphs book (The Pretender, Book 23) 5 stars, making this both two 5-star Animorphs books and three 5-star books in February. All of them have been id-books, like: objectively there may be flaws, and normally an objective flaw will color a book even if I really enjoy it, but there's a horizon where enjoyment outstrips objectivity and I just love the thing. Tobias angst always has the potential to sail over that horizon; I can see why he was so memorable & formative to adolescent readers—like, you know, me.
- The Extreme is the first ghostwritten book, and from now on almost everything is ghostwritten, excepting only The Attack (Book 26), The Separation (Book 32), and The Answer and The Beginning (Books 53 and 54, the last in the series). I'm sure there will be some issues with this, and I've already noticed some weird editing problems I'll discuss in the next batch, but The Extreme (Book 25) read fine to me. If anything, The Pretender (Book 23) felt out of place for being more frank re: marginalization, and it's not ghostwritten!
- The takeaway of the above being: 1) episodic format forgives a lot, 2) even single author(s) [given that Katherine Applegate and Michael Grant co-authored the Animorphs books] can vary over a long series with an episodic format, and 3) the Applegate oversight must provide some quality control, even if it's still a compromise.
- I have so many shipping feels in this goddamn series, and I normally don't get fannish about books. Is this because of the nostalgia? because the episodic style reads almost like a more shippable medium like television? because the MG/YA cusp lends well to both of the above? because of all the Weird Alien Sex things and star-crossed romances and "my boyfriend, the hawk" and "Prince Jake" and "that time I let a Yeerk into my brain"?
- My favorite dynamics are Rachel/Tobias, Aximili/Jake, Jake/Cassie, Cassie/Aftran 942, Tobias/Ax, and all the various interspecies monsterfuckers of my formative adolescence. There's so much weirdness and tension in all the relationships in this series, especially complicated by the fact that these kids are so young & thus the situations and relationships they're in at this age are setting them up for a lifetime of like, monsterfucking, or paraphilia, or whatever power dynamic echoes Jake's "my friends and also subordinates" where there are no boundaries between social life and war, friendship and leadership. These are their first intimate relationships, informing how they have relationships, and they're complicated, uneasy, and deeply weird.
- I say "the various interspecies monsterfuckers of my formative adolescence" in jest but uhhhh this is another "revisiting a thing from my childhood only to discover, oh, That Explains A Lot."
- I didn't take a break between batches 15-19 and 20-25 because 20-22 ended up being one cohesive arc. And then I didn't take a break after 25 because I was having a rough day & wanted to read Animorphs. I set these arbitrary break points primarily to prevent burnout, so I don't care about ignoring them if I'm not burned out. And I'm not. All I want to do read these books. It's such a successful reread project & I really needed something this absorbing right now.
- (That said, when I do manage to read something else, especially if it has wildly different worldbuilding, there's this sense of freshness, almost a shock. Animorphs is never routine—it has so many wild setpieces; it refuses to be routine—but it has in a way become a default for my expectations.
