Hey, remember last January when I said I was gonna read all the Animorphs books in one year? WELL, I DIDN’T! I got less than one-half of the way through! But, to be fair, my own book came out last year AND it was the first year of P3d0President 2.0 so I was pretty f*ckin’ busy being an author and being mad all the time!
THE REUNION is book 30 in the series. It’s a Marco book so you know it will be full of one-liners and sexism! It is also ghostwritten, which I haven’t tracked before this book but maybe I will now. If you’ve forgotten, Marco’s mom’s death was faked and her body was taken over by the number one Visser, Visser One! Visser One isn’t the leader of the Yeerks but she’s very high up there. (You know, I call her “she” but I don’t know the Yeerk’s gender. Do Yeerk’s have the construct we call gender? I forget.)
Anyway, due to some political brouhaha that the Animorphs helped exacerbate, Marco’s Mom Yeerk is on the run cuz the Yeerks think she’s a traitor. The Animorphs try to trick her into baiting Visser 3 by “discovering” the free Hork-Bajir colony. The Animorphs figure this will be a good way to take down both Vissers, but of course they fail.
And honestly, they fail because of friggin Marco, who morphs a Hork-Bajir to trick the vissers, but forgets that the Hork-Bajir talk like Cookie Monster, and he just can’t resist dropping a classic one-liner in morph. A one liner that referenced THE PRINCE OF EGYPT. His Yeerk-Mom is like, “Yeah, you’re not a Hork-Bajir, dumb dumb.” And Marco is like:
There’s a big showdown, and the Animorphs get away, but not before Marco’s Mom Yeerk realizes who he is and falls off a cliff. But since there’s no body, we can assume she is alive, because as Mariah and Whitney said, “Who knows what miracles you can achieve when you believe?”
Number #31, THE CONSPIRACY, is a Tobias book, I love my Hawk-Boy Tobias! Unfortunately I did NOT like this book, because it was 75% Tobias the Hawk being tortured by a Yeerk, which is not fun to read. The plot had promise: The Animorphs learn that the Yeerks have developed a De-Morphing Tool, which would betray the Animorph’s true identities. But the Animorphs have a card up their sleeve, and that is Tobias! See Tobias’s real body is now a Hawk, but when the Yeerks see him, they think he’s an Andalite morphed INTO a hawk. So Tobias learns to morph their Andalite buddy Ax, so that he can be purposefully caught by the Yeerks, who will try to “demorph” him while he’s a hawk, and then think their weapon is broken cuz he stays a hawk. In the process, Tobias almost dies, but because he almost dies he sort of meets his dad, the Andalite Prince Elfangor, and that’s nice. And then at the end he and Rachel kiss, so I guess it all worked out, what’s a little torture when you get a smooch at the end?!
The series continues to develop the kids personalities pretty well, especially Jake and Rachel, who are basically hardened military types at age 13.
I look forward to reading more, and maybe I’ll finish the series by the end of this Cannonball. But probably not, now that I said that.
Also, I’m not gonna rate books this year unless it’s like OMG AMAZING I LOVED THIS SO MUCH. I’ve decided, after having my own book star-rated, that star ratings are STUPID! (Even though I have a pretty good Goodreads rating LOL! #humblebrag But doesn’t mean I haven’t tortured myself over the less than stellar reviews!)