Book Review: Elfangor’s Secret by K. A. Applegate

Book #343 of 2021:

Elfangor’s Secret by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs Megamorphs #3)

Is there any Animorphs opening more unsettling than this one, with its in-media-res presentation of an alternate universe where our heroes are still fighting the same covert alien invasion, but as citizens of a racist, slave-holding empire? Rachel is nowhere to be found, and Jake is coldly considering how to turn Cassie in to the authorities for her subversive compassion towards the nation’s ‘primitive’ enemies without the secret of their human identities making it back to the Yeerks. Luckily an entity soon appears to recall them to their true selves and set them on the task of restoring the timeline, but that’s a surprise as well — rather than the expected Ellimist, it’s Crayak’s agent the Drode, last seen taunting the group in #27 The Exposed. And he tells them now that one Animorph will have to die as a price for being allowed to set things right.

The unease lingers throughout the text, which finds the youths tumbling into the past after Visser Four, who has discovered the Time Matrix that Elfangor hid on earth in The Andalite Chronicles. He’s in the process of altering history to arrange the new reality of the present, which would apparently render humanity easier to conquer, and the team has been linked to the ancient artifact so that they follow in his wake with each successive jump. These time-travel logistics don’t quite make sense if you consider them too hard — a common detriment to the genre, much as I love it — but the ensuing carnage is effectively brutal. From Agincourt to Trafalgar to Normandy, the meddler is primarily focused on changing the outcome of important battles, and the combat scenes are a succession of bloody nightmares even for our seasoned protagonists. They may have gotten used to the idea of killing in their own struggles, but they are unprepared to be dropped into the middle of an active war zone again and again with no immediate context as to which side is supposed to win.

It’s that pervasive bloodshed that registers most in this frantic chase across the centuries, together with the moral compromises that each protagonist winds up making in turn. (This is a Megamorphs volume, so the perspective shifts regularly among them.) In an effort to survive and continue pursuing their target, they are forced to kill fellow humans as they normally never would. Tobias even threatens and then inadvertently slays Adolf Hitler, who by that point in the new chain of events is a lowly unarmed driver, not the evil dictator that everyone remembers and viscerally loathes. Oh, yes: this is also the book where Ax learns about the Holocaust and is rightfully aghast at the depravity of our species, and I believe where we get the first explicit confirmation that, as their names might suggest, Jake and Rachel’s family is Jewish. That bit of representation meant a lot to me as a younger reader, and it still does today.

As for the foreshadowed death, Jake is suddenly shot in the forehead when George Washington is ambushed crossing the Delaware, which is pretty graphic and horrifying even if you correctly predict that he will somehow be brought back to life by the end. (Once the Time Matrix has been secured, Cassie the nominal pacifist devises a plan to stop the Visser’s host from being born by preventing his parents ever meeting, thereby ensuring that the Yeerk wasn’t in a position to discover the device in the first place and resetting everything to normal.) While her cousin is gone, Rachel is likewise killed by a cannonball ripping her chimpanzee body in half, but she’s quickly healed of her wounds, leading to the realization that only one member can die on this mission — possibly due to the Ellimist’s interference, although that’s never confirmed. It’s a gruesome moment too, but the result undercuts the tension a bit much in my opinion. With the Animorphs following their enemy wherever he goes and now unable to die, the odds are stacked too high in their favor, and the eventual victory becomes a foregone conclusion. But hey, at least Rachel’s resurrection leads to her first on-page kiss with Tobias! And Cassie sweetly tells a man calling her racist slurs (not actually written out) that she can turn white for him if he wants, before morphing a polar bear and roaring right into his face.

This remains a great story overall, and one that appears liable to linger for the teens longer than #11 The Forgotten, a previous time-travel escapade that was similarly prevented before it could properly begin. But it feels a little easy in the end, particularly without any final denouement with the Drode or anyone else. Our heroes go through a terrible experience, die a few times, do some horrendous things themselves culminating in wiping an innocent man from existence, and arrive back where they started to a world that will never notice, there to await the inevitable next crisis in their unending resistance war against the Yeerks. The Time Matrix is, presumably, back underneath the construction site where anybody might stumble upon it. That’s all appropriately eerie, but it does seem like we are maybe missing a few steps along the way.

[Content warning for body horror and mention of rape and forced pregnancy.]

★★★★☆

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