Book Review: The Illusion by K. A. Applegate

Book #373 of 2021:

The Illusion by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #33)

Remember that Scholastic Book Fair series from the 90s with all the wacky covers of kids turning into animals? Haha, anyway, this is the volume where one of those middle-schoolers gets captured and violently tortured in excruciating detail for a good portion of the text, fouling himself and breaking his bones against the walls of his cage in agony. He’s in hawk form, and when his captor realizes he’s retreating into the animal mind as a shield from the torment, she turns the device setting to include bursts of pleasure that the bird can’t process to lure him back to his senses, which also provides a contrast to make the returning pain worse.

Hats off to Ellen Geroux, the franchise’s most prolific ghostwriter who certainly makes her debut gig memorable here. It’s one of the hardest Animorphs novels to read, especially for the additional fact that Tobias has entered this situation willingly (volunteering after recognizing Jake’s subtle maneuvering to set him up for it). He didn’t anticipate the torture machine, but the team nothlit let himself be taken by the Yeerks as a test subject for their new Anti-Morphing Ray, which could be catastrophic if deployed upon the heroes in battle. Tipped off in advance by their Chee allies in the previous story, they’re aiming for the enemies to try out the beam on his hawk body and conclude that it doesn’t work when it fails to demorph him further. He even acquires Ax so that he can be seen morphing from Andalite to redtail, leading to a few lovely scenes of nephew and uncle bonding and the boy finally getting to experience that side of his heritage directly.

Mostly, though, this is a brutal time for the protagonist. The sub-visser assaulting him is a pretty young woman reminiscent of Rachel, who’s gradually revealed to be suffering through trauma and a likely psychotic break of her own, losing track of the boundary dividing her Yeerk and human selves. Narratively, the resemblance to his girlfriend is overt and comes at a fitting moment as they navigate how to have a relationship when he is somewhere between boy and hawk and can’t seem to articulate to her why he can never be just the regular teenager she appears to want. (This is not exactly my lane, but if you’re reading Tobias as an allegory for being trans as I know people do, I think this title offers some of your best evidence yet.) The Controller Taylor in a sense reflects Tobias as well, a productive parallel for a figure situated at the crossroads of so many conflicting identities.

In the end, our hero’s friends help him escape, although not before he’s been damaged enough to blurt out a potentially-fatal confession that the Animorphs are all local children, which hopefully goes unnoticed in the melee. He’s had a delirious vision of his father that may or may not have been a genuine message left for him, and come to a new understanding with Rachel, culminating in sharing their first on-page kiss and then going off flying together. The danger of the Anti-Morphing Ray has passed, but only via a harrowing ordeal that of course brings the freedom fighters no closer to actually ending their awful bloody war.

[Content warning for body horror, gore, ableism, and injuries from fire.]

★★★★☆

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