Book #289 of 2021:

The Solution by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #22)

[Note — this review is more spoiler-heavy than usual! It was too hard to discuss this volume without getting into specifics.]

A chilling end to the saga of David, the reluctant recruit who has gradually blossomed over the course of this trilogy into a full-on villain. By now he’s absolutely terrifying, and an altogether greater match for the Animorphs than Visser Three and his legions have ever been. That alien commander is merely ruthless and well-armed; the scrawny teen is devious and cruel as he threatens to tell the Yeerks the true identities of the ‘Andalite bandits’ and uses the kids’ own morphing powers against them. He attacks them as stronger animals, he acquires and morphs into Marco to lure the others as birds into range of a baseball bat, and he becomes something small like a fly to privately taunt and spy on Rachel — a scene with pretty sick implications, although on the page she only mentions deciding not to take a shower while he might still be there, hiding unseen.

Rachel is the other giant strength of this book. We’ve already gotten two different perspectives on the newcomer, but with her as narrator, the story really clicks into gear. This is the girl’s first significant confrontation with her own inner darkness, realizing that perhaps alone among her teammates, she would be willing and able to murder the traitor to neutralize his threat. (We’ve seen them all kill before, of course, but never a human and seldom so cold-bloodedly.) That makes for a powerful crisis of conscience in and of itself, and is compounded by the dawning horror that Jake, her cousin and Animorphs leader, has specifically tapped her for the task. He too seems to understand that if the team needs to put someone down, she’s the one to do it, because on some level, she’ll like it. He compares her bloody enjoyment of their guerilla war to an addiction like alcoholism, and labels himself as her pathetic enabler. That’s a lot for a middle-schooler to wrap her head around.

This situation demands it, however. In his wickedest act, David kills their other cousin Saddler, languishing in the hospital after being struck by a car, and morphs him to take his place right under Jake and Rachel’s noses. (The crime happens off-screen, but it’s implied his body is stashed somewhere like down an elevator shaft.) From that position they can’t assail, he is safe to continue terrorizing them and their families, warning that their only hope is to give him the device that bestows the morphing capability, which obviously they can’t allow either.

Eventually, the good guys win the day. And this section could almost be considered a cop-out, as it relies on David’s mistaken belief that he murdered Tobias at the end of the previous novel when that was some random other hawk, a cheap cliffhanger on the part of author K. A. Applegate. Thus the antagonist thinks he has the group all cornered when he forces everyone but Rachel into cockroach form and seals them in a bottle — with the gruesome reminder that no one can escape by morphing without rupturing themself and the others — only for the overlooked Tobias to saunter up, release them, and spring the actual trap on David. The bizarre thing about this ploy, in addition to Applegate briefly fooling readers into thinking the former nothlit was killed too, is that his role could just as easily have been performed by someone such as Erek the Chee, and David is aware that the gang has allies like that whom he hasn’t met. But I guess that’s just a case of the character not reasoning things through, much as how Marco lies tied up in his closet all night after being attacked, apparently never considering morphing into a smaller creature to get out.

Speaking of Erek, it’s a little strange that we never do learn which of the world leaders is a Controller, as per the intelligence he provided back at the start of the mission with the political summit. But at least that thread comes to a delightful resolution here, with the weary teens unable to pierce through security again to stop the visser’s plans to secretly infest the rest, and so opting to simply morph elephants and rhinos, trampling across the resort site and causing the remainder of the meetings to be canceled. A fun lighter note amid all the bleakness with David.

The reason that the titular solution to that problem works, despite the odd Tobias detail, is that David’s comeuppance is so horrible and the Animorphs so necessarily awful to plot it out and pull it off. After staging a conversation about a false plan when they know he’s listening in, they bait him into morphing a rat with Rachel, only for her to chew through her own tail and flee, with her demorphed friends there to catch David alone in a steel cage. Against his frantic psychic pleas, she sits and waits the two hours until he’s officially stuck in rat form forever. At which point they strand him on a desolate island where no people ever go, to ensure that he never does tell the Yeerks or anyone else their secrets. It’s arguably a fate worse than death, and Rachel is forced to consider the state of her soul as she grimly consigns him to it.

I don’t know if I can honestly call this the darkest title in the series, which has gone to terrible lengths in the past and will do so again before we’re finished. But it’s electrifying throughout and haunting at the end, and even though I’d maintain that the beginning of this experiment in heavier serialization is a bit weak, the payoff to all that setup here is a triumph.

[Content warning for gore.]

★★★★★

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