Books shelved under “Ebook”

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…

Oh man, I did not pick the right time to start reading Haters: Harassment, Abuse, and Violence Online (yay Oxford comma!). I started this two days before the American Election Day, and then after those results, I just had to kind of … put it down a bit. I was planning to read it over a week or so, because like Indigenous Writes, this is an academic-but-accessible book about some heavy stuff, and reading…

I spend a lot of time (hah) thinking about how little we understand the way people in the past actually lived, day to day, simply because technology that we now take for granted has changed things we don’t even think about. I take it for granted that I can know the precise time, as we currently measure it, all the time. I take it for granted that I can flick a switch and have light…

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…

Four years ago, I moved to England to begin my career as a teacher. Fresh out of Lakehead University's Faculty of Education, the dry job market in Ontario left me looking across the Atlantic. Thanks to Engage Education, an agency that specializes in recruiting teachers overseas for the English school system so desperately clamouring for them, I managed to land a classroom right away. When I moved back to Thunder Bay, I got on the…

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…

Extracted was originally published a few years ago, but this edition is apparently “expanded” and contains “bonus material”. I don’t know about that, but I do know that I had never heard of this series until now, and that makes me sad. I’m glad that I got a copy of this to review through NetGalley, because Sherry D. Ficklin and Tyler Jolley have written some fun and original time travel here.

The setup is easy…

You don’t see enough hollow world fiction these days. There is probably a reason for that. Fortunately there are no mole people to be seen here, although there are some merpeople. Emilie and the Hollow World mixes up a couple of genres and devices to create a satisfying adventure story with a likeable protagonist. My chief criticism is simply that Martha Wells doesn’t take it far enough. This is a “safe” book.

Emilie is supposed…

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…

I’ve had this book for ages and just never got around to reading it (I’m really behind on reading my ebooks, because I need to give my tablet a root canal). I figured with an American presidential election around the corner, and with the pseudo-eschatological tones of certain candidates’ campaigns, Archangel Protocol was a nice pairing. I didn’t realize it is 15 years old! Lyda Morehouse says in her preface that she resisted the urge…

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…

This is an odd book. I'm pretty sure it’s good, but I’m not sure I liked it. It took me far longer to read Black Feathers than I usually take to read any book. Part of that was because I spent more time focused on other things over the past few weeks. Most of it, I think was avoidance. Joseph D’Lacey’s writing is good; don’t get me wrong. But I was never in a hurry…