Started reading Animorphs 'cause I wanted to see if it was stupid. Boy was I ever wrong. Kids are fighting against mind-stealing aliens in this incredibly spooky and realistic-sounding character-oriented saga. In the first book they figure out what the circumstances of the invasion are and are given their morphing powers. I read the entire series. It is probably a lot different from what you think. I read these for the first time when I was in my mid-twenties, so that should tell you something. . . . Lots of people think Animorphs is stupid based on their (wrong) assumptions about the books or because they have seen the less-than-stellar television show. But the series is amazing. You can laugh, now shut up and get the first one. Basic premise: Five kids get the ability to morph into any animal they can touch (to acquire their DNA). A dying alien (an Andalite) gave them the power because there are other aliens, slug-like creatures called Yeerks, trying to take over the planet by squirming into people's ears and taking over their bodies. So it's a quiet invasion, people are being taken one by one and then made to act as though everything is cool . . . and of course, they become recruiters for getting more people to infest. The Animorphs--Jake, Rachel, Cassie, Marco, and Tobias (and later, an Andalite kid named Aximili, Ax for short)--are all that stands between the rest of the world and total slavery; they're trying to hold off the Yeerks until the backup Andalite fleet gets there. They use their morphing technology to spy on the Yeerks and to destroy their facilities and whatnot.But what makes these books so amazing is that these are kids, having to pretend they're normal kids so no one knows they're the "Andalite bandits," and they are fighting the enemy while living right out in the open, under their noses. Internal Andalite and Yeerk politics make the situations complicated, and through the fifty-four (and then some) book series it slowly escalates to an all-out war, with a child (Jake, leader of the Animorphs) as basically the president and general of the forces of Earth.Thousands of humans and aliens die, sometimes in violent and horrible ways, and stunning moral crises present themselves all through the series. The Animorphs form alliances with other species and with each other; they have the beginnings of romantic relationships in some cases; they still have homework and family problems (in some cases, serious ones). These six kids put their personal problems aside as best they can and become warriors, completely losing their innocence and most of their humanity in the process. Though they're considered kids' books and the TV show was a bit goofy, I have no doubt that if marketing had been different and the thin serialized books had combined into fourteen or fifteen thicker books, it probably could have been accepted by adults. But since it's an intermediate series, you probably think I'm kidding around about how good these are. But I'm serious. Ms. Applegate's books are not without flaws (there are occasional continuity errors and little speed bumps), but they are highly recommended. Here are some of the inconsistencies and notable aspects of the book: Jake opens the book by claiming he can't reveal his name or identifying personal information because it would help the Yeerks find him and his friends and family. The problem is, they keep up this "we can't tell you who we are" schtick throughout the series until open war is declared late in the game, and despite that even from the beginning there are multiple details that could have easily identified them. This breaking-the-fourth-wall bit is poorly conceived, because it also reveals that the Animorphs are human, and that's a detail they try to keep secret from the Yeerks (and succeed at keeping for over half the series). Just finding any five kids with their names and descriptions at a school in a known area (near The Gardens) would be a pretty easy afternoon's work for a Controller with data processing experience, but since they give even more information (siblings' and parents' names, specific recognitions the kids have gotten, etc.), it would have been cake to track the kids down if these books were actually released into the same world they're trying to hide in.Marco is shown to have always had the capacity to be a master strategist, an ability that comes out obviously much later in the series. Before they even become the Animorphs, Marco uses his strategy abilities to beat Jake in video games.It is shown even in this first book that Cassie and Jake "like" each other. Cassie asks the boys to walk with them when they cut through the construction site; if she hadn't just wanted to have a chance to be near Jake, they might not have all been together to meet the alien. It is a bold step in a children's series to have interracial dating (Cassie is black, Jake is white); not many authors have tried to cover that sort of ground in children's literature, but in these books it totally is beside the point.Jake only knows Tobias because he saved him from bullies once. Now Tobias sort of looks up to him, which is what got him involved in the first place. Little did he know he would pay his hero back by acting as a loyal soldier to Jake in the most bizarre war ever to hit Earth.The Andalite, Elfangor, is said to have a three-dimensional picture of "his family" inside the ship, and there were two that were children. Since Elfangor was an adult when Ax was born, it's unlikely that one of the children was himself, so this is suggesting that Elfangor was the father in the picture and that he had a wife and two children. But in later books there were never any references to Elfangor taking an Andalite mate or having kids. This, like several other issues that crop up in this book, is probably just a result of the author not having worked out all the details yet when she wrote the first book.The kids find out early on that morphing fixes injuries, so it's confusing how Elfangor, who had the morphing power, could have been mortally wounded and not morph to get rid of it. It's possible he was too exhausted, but he was in much better shape than the kids later were sometimes when they morphed to escape mortal injury, and he had enough time and energy to give instructions and information about the Yeerk invasion, so he probably should have been able to morph and fix his injury. He still would have had to deal with Visser Three, but the fight would have been very different. It is also possible he was tired of fighting and had made peace with his death, but that seems a bit unlikely . . . unless he was deliberately doing it to provide a distraction for the Animorphs' escape.A lot is revealed to us through the communication between Elfangor and Visser Three, right before Elfangor is destroyed. In the conversation, it is revealed that the Hork-Bajir are slaves, conquered and stolen by the Yeerks, but that the Taxxons, the giant worms, are actually allies, voluntary hosts. Also, we learn that a "visser" is a rank in the Yeerk society, and that Visser Three aspires to be Visser One. And finally, we find out why the Yeerks want humans: Because they are easy to conquer and very numerous, yet are pleasant bodies to live in.The fight between Visser Three and Elfangor (well, the scene in which the visser eats him) doesn't suggest that they have a very long history. They're clearly rivals, but it's a stale conversation that shows none of the very personal nature of this battle--information readers discover later in the series.When the kids meet the Andalite, Tobias is the most drawn to him, and seems the most sympathetic to his situation. There's a reason for this, which is revealed much later in the series.Jake is appointed the leader very early on, when the other kids are first looking to him to see if they would accept the power to morph. This puzzles him at first, but he is indeed the best leader, and later in the series he embraces his position.This book contains an inconsistency. In this book in several instances, humans were able to project their thoughts, once to the Andalite and also Jake was able to send his thoughts to Tobias while Tobias was morphed but Jake was not. This is not how the thought-communication works in later books; normally they can only direct their thoughts while in a morphed form, and at that point they can direct thoughts to one person or many however they like. But no one can just hear them thinking when they are human (as Prince Elfangor does at the beginning of this book). Ms. Applegate was asked about it in an interview, and she replied that she could make up some kind of lame excuse if she wanted, but in all honesty she'd just made a mistake and hadn't worked that out fully before incorporating it. It's been said that this is fixed in the reprint.Tobias is the first to morph. He turns into his pet cat. It is through that experience that they realize that morphing isn't at all painful, and that they also receive the instincts of the animals they morph into, since Tobias knows who he is while in cat morph but still somehow wants to chase strings and kill mice. Morphing also has the unfortunate side effect of making them turn up naked after they've shrunk out of their clothes, though later they do learn to morph skintight clothing as part of their human forms.Tobias and Jake discover through their first morphing experiences that acquiring an animal's DNA puts the animal into a trance.Another inconsistency was in this book: When Jake turned into his dog, it was more like he was an exact copy of Homer than the same dog from the same DNA. He seemed to have Homer's memories (e.g., he knew a bunch of information, through scent, about another male dog that Homer knew). Also, he was apparently neutered just like his dog, and in a later book the kids acquire DNA from steer and end up morphing into uncastrated bulls, which makes them quite a bit more violent. Apparently the physical details of an animal that are not genetic were still able to be copied at this stage of the game but not later. (This brings up a plethora of questions, such as how copying from DNA can possibly dictate how old they are when they morph, or things like hair growth or weight or distinctive markings acquired through life choices and whatnot.)While in dog form, Jake can apparently smell something he relates to Visser Three when he gets the scent of his brother, Tom. This is because, unbeknownst to him at the time, Tom is a Controller. It seems odd that they don't use the dog's ability to smell Yeerks as a way to detect Controllers in later books.Cassie is revealed to be the best morpher; she is the first to learn to morph clothing and can morph with both more speed and more control than the others.When Tobias acquires a hawk morph from an injured hawk in Cassie's barn (a.k.a. the Wildlife Rehab Clinic), it is discovered that injuries to the acquired animal do not affect the DNA itself, so they can morph into an uninjured animal.The "full members" of The Sharing (a.k.a., people infested with Yeerks) have one of their meetings on an open beach where anyone can just wander up. This lack of security is amazing considering the precautions they're forced to take in later books; it's funny to read this and see Controllers just talking about their plans out in the open.Rachel is also revealed to kind of like Tobias, even this early on. She mentions that she cares about him, and occasionally says and does things to comfort him that she doesn't do for anyone else.
I've been writing about books that were formative for me in my childhood, but Animorphs was the first series that was integral to my childhood. This is the first series that I can remember waiting breathlessly for each and every book and being there the day they came out. My bookcase at some point was just a stack of Animorphs in numerical order. I was so into it that I could usually tell you what book it was by the animal/Animorph on the cover. I watched the television show, which to this day I will argue should be made now because it would do so much better. But not movies. Too many books for a movie. How about a TV series? COME ON SOMEONE DO IT. Anyway I knew everything about this series backwards and forwards, and so when I thought to re-read it, I wondered if I would still love it now. The answer is: absofreakinglutely I love it. If anything the older I got the more I appreciated the character arcs and the themes. I was heartbroken to find out that K. A. Applegate had several of the books ghostwritten, but she still gave the outlines and it was so younger authors could get their start in the business. So I can forgive it. The point is I will always encourage people to read this series. If they ask me what their kid should read, Harry Potter is not my first suggestion. Animorphs is. I'll probably get into why more as the books go on.This is the first book so it is the intro to the main characters and the general plot. Jake is the protagonist of this one, which makes sense considering he becomes the leader of the group for the rest of the series. There was some questioning over their ages, it was vague, but I think a consensus was that they were around 13 in this book. They mentioned junior high and also that they were teenagers, so that's really the option. Jake is a good kid. He has a good heart and the thing that always stuck out to me in the first book was that he protected Tobias. Tobias was the weird kid who got bullied at school, but Jake was kind to him. Jake is shadowed most of the time by his best friend Marco, who is sarcastic and quick witted. Normally you think he'd be delegated to comic relief or side kick, but all of the Animorphs are main characters and protagonists in their own right. The other two characters are best friends Rachel and Cassie, and Rachel is Jake's cousin. Together the five of them accidentally come across an alien dying in an abandoned construction site. It is an odd creature who looks like a horse (with a deadly tale) but has no mouth, and communicates through telepathic speech. He is Prince Elfangor, an Andalite, and he was there to try and save Earth from another species invading, the Yeerks. The Yeerks are a slug species who can go into someone's ear and become them, and that's how they take over the world, slowly and methodically and feed off their resources.Elfangor gives them a special ability: they can take the form of any animal that they touch/imprint on. This becomes important as they get more and more morphs over the course of the series. It seems like a small power to have considering how dangerous the enemies are, but once they get into battle morphs, they really own their abilities. They can't stay in a morph for longer than two hours or they'll stay there forever, a fact that becomes a reality when Tobias is stuck in hawk form for a very long time afterward. There is so much to Tobias' storyline, so I'll get into that more when it's a story from his perspective. The kids watch as Elfangor is murdered by the villainous Visser Three. The team is shaken and uncertain if they really want to believe in the story. They're just kids, what can they do? They meet at Cassie's barn (her parents are vets), which becomes a major point of meetings from then on. They start to get paranoid about Controllers, the humans that the Yeerks have already invaded, and find out at least one police officer is a Controller. Slowly but surely they come to realize that their town is really infiltrated, and they can't trust anyone.A major plot point that takes up most of the series is introduced here, and that's Jake's brother Tom is one of them. It becomes his driving force in the story, that he can't give up or let anything happen, because he needs to save his brother. All of them learn that people in their life are Controllers sooner or later, but Tom is the first one. They realize the school assistant principal Mr. Chapman is the leader of a group called "The Sharing" and that's when they turn kids into Controllers. Yiiiiikes. It seems like a small scale thing, to force kids to be them first, but it does make some sense. People aren't afraid of kids and they'd probably be able to sway adults into following them places. Like little honey pots. The team find out that a Yeerk pool, a place Yeerks have to stay in order to survive, is in their school. Their very first mission they try to infiltrate after Cassie gets kidnapped, but they find themselves easily out classed by Visser Three and his people. They get away with their lives, but Tobias is trapped as a hawk. They vow to fight from then on and to find a way to save Tom, their town, and the world!There are so many good things here. The first book managed to introduce all the characters and their basic personalities. Jake is the angsty good hearted leader, Marco's the snarky one, Rachel's aggressively awesome, Cassie's gentle and thoughtful, and Tobias is ... well also angsty, but mostly just introverted and lost. Tobias is the one who gets most excited about shifting and he welcomes their change of life, although not exactly being a whole different species at first. The main plot is introduced, the major villain (to start with), and it doesn't shy away from letting these characters just be realistic kids. They are terrified of what happened to them. They are scared of what is coming ahead. They're between a rock and a hard place, and this is what they need to do to survive. I like that they're not immediately heroic. They're doing what they must, and real courage comes when you're afraid but still fight. Or at least that's the message that came from this. It was interesting science fiction/fantasy, with several alien races not fully explored yet, and a huge wide world we only scratched the surface of.I was twelve when this book came out, the exact age demographic they were going for. But at 31, I still had a blast reading this from cover to cover. Next!
What do You think about The Invasion (1996)?
Brought to you by The Moonlight Library!I’ve been thinking about this review for a while. There’s two major difficulties: it’s often hard to write a great review of an amazing book, and how does one review a book one has read a billionty times since one was ten years old? (That was nearly twenty years ago. I SAY NEARLY I AM NOT THAT OLD.) This is an establishing review as well, so it will be longer than my other ones.Let’s start from the beginning. I first saw this book when I was ten years old in my school library. It sat alongside book #2. I seem to recall half of my class telling me about this book, because #2 had a girl turning into a cat and everyone knew I liked cats (as should be obvious from my blog header). I was tempted to read #2 first because as an eight year old I wasn’t aware that book series had this thing called ‘continuity’ – I’d read Goosebumps, the Babysitter’s Club, and the Saddle Club, each of which you could pull out a random book and enjoy a stand-alone story – especially Goosebumps, of which most of the books were unrelated. I was unprepared for the overarching story arc that encompassed all the books. This was especially relevant when I read #2: The Visitor, but we’ll get to that in the next reviewIn #1 The Invasion, Jake is our narrator. He’s an average guy – he’s got good grades, is good-looking, likes basketball and video games. His best friend is short, annoying Hispanic Marco. His crush is black farm girl Cassie. His cousin is blonde Amazon warrior Rachel. There’s also this weird, quiet kid Tobias. The five take a walk through a construction site, meet a dying alien who warns them of a silent invasion and gives them a power to fight back: the power to morph. That means they can turn into any animal they touch. Unfortunately, so can their greatest enemy: Visser Three. He’s the alien leading the invasion and wants nothing more than to destroy our trusty Animorphs. He’s also scary in a love-to-hate kind of way: psychotic, ambitious, and completely ruthless.The book follows the kids’ first adventures: acquiring powerful ‘battle morphs’ and attacking the Yeerk pool, where the invading parasitic slugs have to return every three days. Not everything turns out OK, which is what I love about Applegate. She’s not afraid to give us an unhappy ending, even in her children’s fiction. Looking back, I can see that the prose is written with a breakneck pace. You don’t want to tear your eyes away from it. It’s so breathtaking that the non-essential parts are left out and your brain has to race to catch up. There are also a few mistakes that Applegate would later refer to as KASUs (Katherine Applegate Screws Up) such as Tobias in cat morph able to hear Jake’s thoughts, which was removed from the reprint.The best thing about these novels, what made them so popular and what made Applegate want to write them in the first place is looking through the eyes of the human as they’re morphing and describing everything in vivid detail, even the gross parts, and looking at the world through the eyes of the animal filtered by our human narrator. Applegate really gets into the head of Jake’s dog, lizard, and tiger. It’s joyful, scary, comforting, amazing. And that’s what made these books so special.
—Nemo (the Moonlight Library)
I read these about 10 years ago, so there isn't much I can say about each individual one. Instead I'll comment here instead, and add a few things here and there on my favourite ones throughout my other reviews.This set of novels, incredibly numerous they are, got me REALLY HOOKED on reading. Going back to re-read them, I might be disappointed and have to change ALL of the 5 star ratings. To be honest, I can't remember all of the individual plots, because there are so many of them, and I'd have no where to begin really, other than at the beginning... This book.The characters are fun. The action is intense and at times quite gory, the reading is accessible, the story is INCREDIBLY bleak for a children's novel, but keeps enough hope that parents weren't up in arms (or at least I never heard about them being up in arms). The world is incredible; the villains ubiquitous and intellectually scary rather than physically scary.In any case, I remember my dad being reluctant to take me to the bookstore to buy another one of these, but they were my crack. I loved them.All of the memories of road trips, long drives, late nights and early mornings spent with my nose buried deep in the crisp pages of an Animorphs book, as the characters at the bottom of the page slowly morphed into something else, are worth 5-stars alone.
—Adam
Loved these books as a kid, of course. The regular visit to the bookstore for new each installment was a big highlight of each month.What's really amazing is the power these books have when you go back to them. There was a time when I was depressed, and in my angsty boredom I looked at the full Animorphs collection sitting on my bookshelf and grabbed one of them to read. At first, the large font and simple syntax were a bit jarring, and I didn't know how well these books would hold up. But almost immediately I was absorbed back into the heads of these characters, and I remembered all the ways I identified with them and related to them. The plots were as thrilling as ever, but this time I paid more attention to the ways many complex ethical issues, questions, and debates were woven into these stories. I could see more parallels between the world of Animorphs and the real world I was learning about. I tore through the rest of the series after glancing through that one book, and somewhere along the way I snapped out of my depression. (It might have been the book when Marco gets depressed and Cassie is all sympathetic but Jake just says "Marco. Snap out of it.") I felt stronger as a person after reliving this war through the characters I knew so well. The characters will leave their mark on you, and revisiting these books is a powerful way to remember that influence. I'm so glad to see this series back on bookstore shelves.
—Dan
