Book #355 of 2021: The Reunion by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #30) I’m not a fan of the coincidence-heavy setup to this Animorphs volume — Marco has a nightmare involving his mom, the Controller to the Yeerk Visser One, which leads him to skip school and randomly go to the city’s business district, where she …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Reunion by K. A. Applegate”
Book #349 of 2021: The First Journey by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs Alternamorphs #1) I went into my adult reread of this choose-your-own-adventure Animorphs title with pretty low expectations, and yet it somehow still managed to disappoint. Who exactly is the audience here? The tone is more juvenile than the main novels, with lots of …
Continue reading “Book Review: The First Journey 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 …
Continue reading “Book Review: Elfangor’s Secret by K. A. Applegate”
Book #337 of 2021: The Sickness by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #29) I’m not ordinarily a fan of unrelated subplots coincidentally happening at the same time, and so I rolled my eyes a bit at the start of this novel, when two crises crash down upon the Animorphs at once. At a school dance — …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Sickness by K. A. Applegate”
Book #331 of 2021: The Experiment by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #28) “In the annals of stupid, screwed-up, pointless missions that was the stupidest, most pointless of them all,” says Marco at the end of this title, and it’s hard to really argue with him. 32 books into my decades-later reread of this series (including …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Experiment by K. A. Applegate”
Book #325 of 2021: The Exposed by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #27) The second ghostwritten Animorphs novel offers a decent if anticlimactic adventure, most notable for the deep underwater scenes of Rachel and Tobias as sperm whales hunting and battling a giant squid to bring up to the surface for the whole team to acquire. …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Exposed by K. A. Applegate”
Book #319 of 2021: The Attack by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #26) A whole twenty volumes after Jake saw a vision of a malevolent red eye turning his way as the Yeerk inside him starved to death back in book #6, we finally learn something of this terrible presence. His name is Crayak, and he …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Attack by K. A. Applegate”
Book #313 of 2021: The Extreme by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #25) As a kid, I never knew that many of the latter Animorphs books were ghostwritten, with credited series author K. A. Applegate — already a pen name for the joint efforts of Katherine Applegate and her husband Michael Grant, likewise unknown to younger …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Extreme by K. A. Applegate”
Book #307 of 2021: The Suspicion by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #24) If I’m being honest, this adventure is fairly inessential and a bit cartoonish, especially in its abrupt ending of Visser Three and his troops agreeing to just walk away from the ‘Andalite bandits’ in an exhausted temporary truce. But I kind of love …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Suspicion by K. A. Applegate”
Book #301 of 2021: The Pretender by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #23) This Animorphs title feels built around a single scene near the end, when our current narrator sits down to hear a piece of news about his family that most readers likely already learned in The Andalite Chronicles, published the previous year. He is …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Pretender by K. A. Applegate”
The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more