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Live Blogs EVERY Animorphs book reviewed by Me
Tuckerscreator2013-01-03 17:31:20

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Hello there, and welcome to my Animorphs liveblog. For the next few months, I am going to be doing a unique challenge: reading and reviewing every single one Animorphs books. I have just gotten an awesome Christmas present of 54 books (thank you Mom!), many of which I haven’t even read, and so I will be writing my experiences reading each one here for you.

Now, several notes about this challenge:

  • I will only be reviewing books I own. No working from memory alone. I own books #1-54, but am missing #48. Reviewing from memory can be unfair and faulty, and I wish to approach each book fresh.
  • I won’t be reviewing the side books. I don’t own any of the Alternamorphs, none of the Chronicles, and only one of the Megamorphs, #3. Now, if I can find them at the local library I will review them, but otherwise I will stick to what I have. So for now that means only Megamorphs 3 will be reviewed but no others.
  • I won’t be reviewing the TV series in this liveblog. Unless someone can point me to a good channel or playlist where most of them are. I’ve had trouble trying to track down each episode on Youtube. If so, that will be a separate liveblog, and done after this one.

What I hope to gain from this series:

1. Tracking the development of the series’ plot over time.
2. See the purpose for writing each book. How does it advance the plot?
3. Locating the difference between KA Applegate and her various ghostwriters.
4. Understanding what makes the characters’ develop and tick.
5. Identifying the structure of Animorphs’ universe.
6. Identifying the themes of series and how they emerge and are supported.
7. Fun!

Sounds heavy, but I’m confident the series can support them. That’s why I loved the series and why its page on this wiki is so big. If you haven’t read the books: here’s a one-minute summary.

  • Five kids walking through a construction site one night find a dying alien Andalite warrior named Elfangor, who tells them Earth is being invaded by aliens called Yeerks. The Yeerks are tiny slug-like critters that infest people and take over their brain, allowing them to begin a secret invasion. To counter this, Elfangor gives them morphing ability, which lets them acquire the DNA of animals and transform into them. The power comes at the price of trapping you in the animal body forever if you stay in it for more than 2 hours. A minute later the Yeerk Big Bad Visser Three eats Elfangor and the kids escape and form the guerilla resistance group dubbed the “Animorphs”, who will fight to defend Earth while they wait for the Andalite navy to arrive and save everybody. And so, the books begin. Have fun!

Book 1: The Invasion.

So, the cover. Honestly, I don’t like that this cover is the image for the series’ page here. It’s one of the ugliest, being the very first one. This one seemed to use computer models to change the kid on the cover from a boy to a lizard, but that only led to unfortunate results. I’m glad all the later books abandoned computer models.

The corners of each page also first establish the series’ fun tradition: a flipbook of the book’s protagonist morphing. This one has our main character Jake transforming into a green anole lizard, and it looks way cooler than the cover. Why could they have used this one? It shows his whole body transforming! Looks like they actually used a real picture of a lizard too, not an awful model. Best of all, halfway through Jake looks like a Velociraptor.

The book opens with the gang of kids that will become our protagonists joining up for a simple walk back home. But along the way they encounter a descending alien ship. The introduction and dialogue of the gang can feel a little cheesy today, and the aging references don’t help, but maybe that’s just me speaking as now a decade older than I was when I first read this book. The part with Elfangor is nothing we haven’t seen before. I'm Dying, Please Take My MacGuffin, etc. Can’t write anything about his personality, though that’s excused by him being about to die.

But that all changes once the Yeerks arrive. Applegate really shows her strength her in describing feelings. You really feel like these kids are terrified. All the detail, their stomach churning, their teeth chattering, giving a visceral description of fear. You might even start feeling pretty afraid yourself, and given what they’re seeing you can’t blame them.

If you've never been really afraid, let me you— it does things to you. It takes over your mind and your body. You want to scream. You want to run. You want to wet your pants. You want to throw yourself down on the ground and cry and beg please, please, please, please don't kill me! And if you think you're brave, well, wait till you're cowering a few feet away from from a monster who can turn you into coleslaw in about three seconds flat.

The aliens’ designs are fantastically unique. Andalites? Freaky. Hork-Bajir? Threatening. Taxxons? Very scary. Their designs avert the problem of Rubber-Forehead Aliens, and make you feel like you’re getting a glimpse of the bigger universe already, even in a little construction site. There’s visceral fear and there’s ominous fear. And lastly there’s guilt when Jake’s escape relies on the chasing aliens mistaking a homeless man for him. Overall, a very good beginning.

The next part of The Invasion takes us to Jake’s house, where we witness morphing for the first time. It strikes me just how strange Tobias feels, doubly shocking because I empathized with him the most when I was younger. It’s mainly because he doesn’t seem affected at all by the horror of aliens eating each other at the construction site, while Jake is still struggling to keep himself held together. The fact that he’s going crazy as a cat adds to this. And there’s this:

“Geez, Jake, don’t you understand? I know what I can do and what I can’t do. I can’t make plans and tell people what to do. I’m not the leader. You are.”
I laughed rudely. “I’m not the leader of anything.”
He just looked at me with those deep, troubled eyes – eyes I can now see only in my memory. “Yes, Jake, you are the leader. You are the one who can bring us all together and help us defeat the Controllers.”

Whoa, little intense there, Tobias. So by his logic, Jake is the leader because Tobias isn’t? Um, there’s still three other kids who could qualify. Now, Jake DOES become the Animorphs’ leader, but this is kinda a bad way to force that. So far we haven’t seen anything in Jake’s actions or character that would make him the best leader.

But we do find out a little about Jake’s life in the following pages. We learn that he loves basketball and is pretty close to his brother. But basketball is less of a concern when there’s a possible alien invasion coming, and his brother Tom isn’t as warm to him today. Ordinary life contrasts with the fantastic here, especially as we hear Jake grumble about having to mow the lawn.

The next section takes us to Cassie’s farm, and and we quickly find out how the team dynamic will be. Rachel is focused on cementing the facts of the situation. Cassie is being dreamy. Most of all, Marco is being whiny.

Okay, maybe whiny is too strong of a word. What I really like here is that Marco isn’t made in a Straw Complainer.

“Look, why do we have to deal with this? I say we just forget it. We never talk about it. We never morph. We just deal with our own lives. We could get killed! Don’t you get it? You saw what happened to the Andalite. I mean, this is radical stuff, Jake. This is real. Real! We could all get killed. Look, I think these Controllers* are jerks. But if something happened to me… my dad. He wouldn’t be able to handle it.”*

Tobias was looking at Marco with this sideways look, like he thought maybe Marco was some kind of coward. I knew better. Marco had his reasons.

Forget Jake, Marco is the Ensemble Dark Horse of this book. His relationship with his dad in light of his mom’s death are detailed more as The Invasion goes on, and it’s heartwarming to see his turn at the end to join the others in infiltrating the Yeerk Pool*

and rescuing Jake’s infested brother. “Oh, shut up! You’re my best friend, you jerk. Like I’m going to let you go face all this alone? I’m in. I’m in, to rescue Tom. That’s it. Then I’m done.”

Still, it’s kinda annoying to hear him keep protesting nearly every page. And I could criticize that we don’t get much of a feel for what Rachel and Cassie are like. But hey, we’ve got 53 books for that.

The kids figure out the fundamentals of their morphing powers: that they have a two hour limit, that they have to really concentrate on the animal to transform, only skintight clothing morphs, they receive telepathic communication, and most importantly the animal’s mind still exists alongside theirs. This aspect is where the series’ knowledge of biology really shines, though it gradually gets annoying to keep reading about them having to fight its instincts. But again, they have 53 books to learn.

That biology continues as we head to the Gardens, the local amusement park and zoo where the kids will meet many times there to acquire new animals. It’s amusing how the animals are often actually kinda apathetic about the kids coming up to them. The security guard chase is annoying but obligatory. And Marco’s whininess fades in favor of his snarkiness.

  • Marco as he acquires a gorilla: “I loved your work in King Kong Versus Godzilla.”
  • “Now do you see why it’s crazy to think we can beat the Yeerks? I mean, come on: we can barely beat zoo security.”
  • As Jake tries to acquire a tiger: “Acquire? Acquire what? You can’t acquire anything about him. He’s the acquirer, and you’re the acquiree. He’s going to acquire your butt for dinner! He’s going to acquire you and spit out the bones!”
  • “[The tiger’s] magnificent. But let’s get out of here before he shows us why he’s king of the jungle.”

The Lancer almost always feels cooler than the hero. But anyway, the kids gain their power morphs and plan to invade the Yeerk pool, hoping to rescue Tom tonight. But Cassie is missing, and that’s just the first sign that things will go wrong.

“What is the matter with him?” I exploded. “[Tobias has] got a two-hour limit and we don’t know how long this is going to take!”

Unsubtle foreshadowing.

Tobias swooped down and perched on Rachel’s shoulder. It surprised me a little. Why would Tobias perch on Rachel’s shoulder? And she didn’t seem annoyed. She rubbed her head against him a little.

Subtler foreshadowing. But Tobias is having too much fun as a hawk and is refusing to exit, which makes me wonder how the kids managed to get down to the Yeerk Pool without anyone noticed the random hawk they were carrying.

Surprise surprise, Cassie has been captured! It’s up to the rest of the gang to kick butt and save her. They summon the powers of Elephant! Tiger! Gorilla! Birdy! I leave you with these to let you visualize the awesome beatdown. Don’t concern yourself with the Fridge Logic that the guards suddenly seem to have forgotten their guns.

But it’s a victory only in that they got out of there alive. Visser Three BECOMES the Bigger Fish and nearly all the rescued are killed by his Eldritch Abomination morph. Tom has a moment of Leeroy Jenkins, and unfortunately gets thrust aside and loses his own rescue. That’s the closest Jake will ever get to saving in him in a long, long time.

The next morning things are seemingly forced to be back to normal. The controlled Tom arrives home that night and gives no sign that he was nearly rescued. The kids have to take their school tests while struggling to deal with their memories of the screams of prisoners in the Yeerk Pool. Worst of all, that Yeerk Pool entrance is always just down the hallway.

And Tobias is trapped in his hawk morph. Honestly, though I wish they had delayed the trapping until later in the series so that it could deliver a greater shock, it still hits pretty hard after the end of a terrible battle. The tone of the series is effectively set here: the kids will be forced to live their double lives of trivial school and being in war, but they’ll never chose to stop fighting.

And that is Book 1 of Animorphs! See you around for Book 2, The Visitor, where the story takes place from the view of Rachel.

Comments

Eegah Since: Dec, 1969
Jan 6th 2013 at 7:49:35 PM
Some real Early Installment Weirdness here, most notably the infamous error where Jake uses thought speak as a human. The rest I won't point out for possible spoilers.

They really make a surprising amount of progress here considering how long the series lasted; by the end I was half wondering if the Yeerks would be defeated right here and the rest of the series would be about something else.
Tuckerscreator Since: Dec, 1969
Jan 8th 2013 at 9:35:23 AM
Indeed. And Tobias sucks his finger because his cat scratched him earlier even though that injury should have been healed by his morphing. And yet later, Marco explains out why morphing heals them...

I had the opposite reaction; I was wondering how they were going to manage to "blow up the Yeerk pool" when they didn't have any explosives. Still, it's true, they were really on fire for the first few books! Then things would settle down to Monster Of The Week.
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