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 — …
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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 …
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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. …
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Book #321 of 2021: The Magic Labyrinth by Philip José Farmer (Riverworld #4) This 1980 sci-fi finale is honestly worse than the miserable third volume, although it picks up slightly for its closing stretch, in which the tower at the headwaters of the river is finally reached and breached. Not that that goal has ever …
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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 …
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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 …
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Book #309 of 2021: The Dark Design by Philip José Farmer (Riverworld #3) The longest, slowest, and most inscrutable Riverworld novel yet. Another decade has passed in this strange afterlife, although technology, politics, and culture don’t seem to have changed much in the meantime. The biggest recent development is that people are no longer resurrected …
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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 …
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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 …
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Book #297 of 2021: The Fabulous Riverboat by Philip José Farmer (Riverworld #2) It’s two decades later in the Riverworld, that strange place where everyone from earth’s history woke up restored to their 25-year-old bodies, which have not gotten any older in the meantime. (The children have likewise stopped aging after catching up to the …
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