Okay, first, I feel like I need to preface this review by confessing that if I had read this book for the first time at age thirty-one, I wouldn’t be giving it five stars. My rating is entirely colored by my intense nostalgic feelings of love for it. As an adult reading it as a part of an ongoing series, this is a solid book that does some really cool things. But for a kid who’d never read any science-fiction before, this book absolutely GOBSMACKED […]
I never really liked JTT. Not my thang.
Another switcheroo, here. I was surprised when I realized that childhood favorite The Forgotten is not actually very good, and that this one, which I didn’t like very much when I was a kid, is actually super enjoyable. Maybe it’s just that it’s a Rachel book, and those are always intense, but where in the last one I found that the narrative voice felt off, like it was trying too hard, this one immediately felt on and sure of itself, just like Rachel. There’s nothing […]
The Animorphs pull out the reset button.
I remember loving The Forgotten when I was a kid, but it really is pretty useless in the grand scheme of things, other than to establish that time-travel is a thing (this is achieved by falling through a Sario Rip, literally a hole in space-time, as the Andalites call them). That lazy genre classic, the Reset Button, shows up here and shows up hard. By the end, no one but Jake even remembers most of the events in the book. Actually, most of the time-travel […]
Saving the world for dogs.
The Android was always one of my favorite Animorphs books when I was a kid because, even before I knew what it was, I loved worldbuilding in fiction. This is one of the reasons I love serialized storytelling so much, because serialized stories (no matter the medium) are the ones that have the most room to deepen and define their fictionalized worlds without sacrificing character or theme. And The Android does quite a bit of worldbuilding in a short period of time. We’re introduced to […]