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 […]
The one with the skunks.
So Cassie is the killjoy Animorph, apparently? I wasn’t a part of the fandom back in the day, and I’m still not, so I really have zero idea what other Animorphs fans think of plots and characters. I just know what I think, and I always liked her when I was a kid, perhaps because I have a permanent streak of killjoy in me myself. I was always the first kid asleep at slumber parties by several hours (if I didn’t call my mom to […]