You searched for book_author:"K.A. Applegate"
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These “Chronicles” special volumes are always a delight. Visser is the story of Visser One, aka Edriss 562, whose host body is also Marco’s mom. Visser One is on trial by the Council of Thirteen, the ultimate governing body of the Yeerks, subject only to the whims of the Yeerk Emperor, whose identity is known only to the council members. Visser Three is prosecuting the trial, and his rivalry with Visser One is a major…
So in the last book we were down an Animorph, sort of, and in this book we gain an Animorph, sort of. The Discovery is the start of the Third Age of Animorphs: the stakes are higher, the action is more intense, and the consequences are further reaching than we’ve ever seen.
(One day I hope to have a successful sideline as a writer of “next week” TV promos.)
If memory serves, this is all…
OK, been a while since I’ve dropped one of these into the rotation. The Mutation is the first Jake-narrated book since #31: The Conspiracy. Whereas the previous book focused heavily on the tough decisions Jake must make as a leader, The Mutation instead explores more broadly the toughness required of all the Animorphs. This book is like a bizarre mash-up of James Bond and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
The Animorphs discover that…
Somebody’s getting married!
It’s not Marco. That would be weird. Applegate has a lot of messed up stuff in Animorphs, including child soldiers, but not child brides (or grooms).
No, Marco’s dad has a new love interest, and it’s serious. Marco doesn’t know how he feels about this, what with his mother still being alive but playing host to an evil alien bent on killing or subjugating all humans. Unfortunately, the Animorphs have a…
At this point in the Animorphs series, the team has been fighting the Yeerks long enough that each of them must come to terms with how this war is changing them. The Prophecy is Cassie’s turn, as she suddenly finds herself riding shotgun with the personality of Aldrea (remember her from The Hork-Bajir Chronicles?). The Animorphs need Aldrea’s personality to help them retrieve a cache of weapons on the Hork-Bajir homeworld. With it, the…
Damn but the cuts keep coming.
This is probably one of my favourite books of the series. The Illusion is Tobias’ moment. Although early books in the series address the challenges Tobias faces living as a hawk, this book drives home the incompatibility of his life with human lives. Red-tailed hawks don’t live as long as humans. Tobias can only assume human form for two hour intervals, assuming he doesn’t want to lose his morphing…
I’d like to gush over this one and give it five stars because it’s Rachel and my bias for her awesome/tragic character arc knows no bounds. Except. Except. The Separation is just not a very good novel. It has a cool (albeit unoriginal) idea that is squandered on a dull threat-du-jour.
Have you seen Superman III? What about the TOS episode “The Enemy Within”? The Voyager episode “Faces” (even more so than the TOS…
In case you were wondering if the gut punches ever stop coming, the answer is no. No, they do not. First Marco and his mom, and now Jake and his brother. Applegate plays hardball in #31: The Conspiracy, where Jake and his family will be away from the city for four days, which is a problem for Tom's Yeerk, who must return to the Yeerk pool in three days to feed. This sets into…
The Animorphs series is many things over its 54+ book run. At times it is moving, heart-wrenching in its portrayal of the cost of war. At times it is humorous, heart-warming in its depictions of compassion in the face of hatred and misunderstanding.
At times it reaches into very dark places and confronts us with images that sear themselves into your soul.
I’m not trying to be dramatic. Well, maybe a little. But #30: The…
It’s another Megamorphs, and more time travel! This time it’s not the Ellimist who sends them back but Crayak, of all entities, via the Drode, because a Yeerk got its hands on the Time Matrix, and ain’t nobody wants that. Of course, Crayak has a “price” to enlisting the Animorphs: one of them must die!
This book is dark in a way few of the previous Animorphs books have been. And its darkness…
A sequel to #19: The Departure, The Sickness moves forward the Yeerk peace movement subplot. And I don’t know how you can possibly hate on Cassie after reading this book, because she literally saves the day single-handedly. She is boss mode.
I mean, if Cassie had been any more successful, she would be a Mary Sue. Not only does she infiltrate the Yeerk Pool, without any backup, by hosting a sympathetic Yeerk, rescue…
I am ambivalent about this one. On the one hand, Ax! Being delightfully too human! Soaps! On the other hand … everything else.
The plot of #28: The Experiment is a mess. It’s backwards, in fact, with the big reveal delayed and stuck at the end as some kind of huge twist when it should have been up front. What we’re left with is a couple of attempts by the Animorphs to infiltrate a meat-packing…
The Chee are back, sort of, but they’ve got problems on the Animorphs can fix. It involves a deep dive, acquiring two new morphs, and weighing the consequences of the sides you pick. The Exposed has its moments, but after the explosiveness of The Attack, its more goofy drama feels incongruous.
Rachel is an excellent narrator for this story. She is good at taking weird in stride: when Erek shows up at the mall…
The Animorphs save everyone with the Power of Love™, and it would be disgusting if they didn’t need this win so very much.
The Attack is notoriously the last Animorphs book written exclusively by K.A. Applegate for a very long stretch. As such it is regarded (accurately) as an island of quality among otherwise mediocre, or at least uneven, books. Indeed, this is a great book—not quite five stars, because it didn’t really move me…
And so we’ve reached the ghostwriter era, with The Extreme delivering a fairly dull adventure to an exciting place: the Arctic.
There’s not actually much wrong with this book. The trouble is that it comes on the heels of a particularly strong moment in the series—the David trilogy and The Hork-Bajir Chronicles—and most stories would look boring in comparison. Unfortunately for a story called The Extreme, Marco and the other Animorphs don’t get…
Another Cassie book, more in the vein of #14: The Unknown than #19: The Departure. Applegate experiments with absurdism here With slightly more sophisticated humour than “hah hah, it’s an Andalite toilet!”—riffs on gender and politics and, of course, bureaucracy—The Suspicion holds a little more appeal on the comedic front. Also, the story is better, even if the ending is a hot mess.
Instead of Area 51 and horses, this time we get…
Back on the Animorphs re-read train with The Pretender, our first Tobias book in what feels like forever. Tobias leads the Animorphs in rescuing a captured free Hork-Bajir child; meanwhile, he has to deal with the usual teenage angst: some woman claiming to be his cousin wanting to take care of him, a letter from his departed father to be read on his birthday, and another red-tailed hawk muscling in on his prime…
Instalments like this one make me sad that regular Animorphs novels were sandwiched into bite-sized morsels that …
… wait, let me restart this with a metaphor less likely to make me hungry.
Instalments like The Hork-Bajir Chronicles demonstrate what K.A. Applegate can do when she can write longer-form stories. The shorter Animorphs novels have their advantages—they are easy to read, almost episodic, and obviously we wouldn’t have as many of them if they were…
I’m trying to be sparing with my five stars in this series, but oh man … Rachel. Applegate just always breaks my heart with her, and The Solution is yet another perfect example. In the conclusion to the David trilogy, Rachel is instrumental in implementing the titular “solution” to the Animorphs’ problem. It is ironic that a human enemy, rather than a Yeerk one, forces the Animorphs to be at their coldest yet.
Let’s just…
What is this I can’t even.
#21: The Threat strips away any remaining pretensions that this is a “children’s” series. This is YA at its grittiest. Long before we had people volunteering themselves as tribute and running through mazes and choosing which Personality House they belong to, we had David the Traitor betraying the Animorphs because he is a terrible human being.
We’ve seen this theme before in the book. Applegate reminds us that humans…
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