#1: The Invasion

My name is Jake. That's my first name, obviously. I can't tell you my last name. It would be too dangerous. The Controllers are everywhere. Everywhere. And if they knew my full name, they could find me and my friends, and then... well, let's just say I don't want them to find me. What they do to people who resist them is too horrible to think about.

I won't even tell you where I live. You'll just have to trust me that it is a real place, a real town.

I'm writing this all down so that more people will learn the truth. Maybe then, somehow, the human race can survive until the Andalites return and rescue us, as they promised they would.

Maybe.

So it begins. The first book of what would become a wildly popular middle-grade book series starts with the all-important origin story. As I mentioned in the introduction, I at first didn't much care for what I read of this book. I only went back and read the whole thing after later books drew me into the story. Luckily for me, almost every single Animorphs book recaps the entire origin story in the first chapter, so I didn't really have to read the first one.

Re-reading the opening scene, I can kind of see why 11-year-old me was kind of turned off by it. Two teenage boys - Jake and Marco - are playing video games, one of them (Jake) worrying about how he'll tell his older brother Tom that he didn't make the basketball team. Then they run into another boy, Tobias, whom Jake had previously met when he stopped two other boys from bullying him. The sci-fi stuff hasn't come up yet, so all we have are the characters, and so far it's all very guyzone. I think, despite Animorphs being recommended to me by a girl, I got the distinct impression that this series was for boys only. It was a fairly reasonable assumption to make after two pages of reading: I didn't yet know that K.A. stood for Katherine Alice, and most children's entertainment is pretty rigidly gender-segregated.

Of course, as soon as I stop reading, Rachel and Cassie show up. It's important to establish early on that Rachel is beautiful, because the contrast between her Valley Girl appearance and BAMFy personality is an important part of her character. Unfortunately, her cousin happens to be narrating the first book, so Jake has a bit of a Les Cousins Dangeroux moment where he mentions that she's really pretty, not that he thinks of her in that way because he totally doesn't, she's his cousin, I mean yuck, moving on...

Jake admits to having a crush on Cassie, Rachel's best friend, though he never knows what to say to her. Aww. There are a number of delightfully subversive things happening right off the bat here:

1. The author, without making a big deal of it, sets up an interracial romance, which in 1996 only about half of Americans approved of. That's sort of like if Diary of a Wimpy Kid gave the main character a crush on another boy. For the time, it's kind of huge. Even in progressive '90s entertainment, the black characters generally were either single or carefully paired up with other black characters. K.A. herself lampshaded this trope in her 1994 romance series Boyfriends/Girlfriends (later renamed Making Out): the black character Aisha resists dating the only black guy on the island for a long time specifically because all her white friends assume their relationship is inevitable. (They do end up dating. And yes, I read that entire series, even the ghostwritten ones. Nina+Benjamin 4eva.)
2. Cassie is Rachel's friend who is black, but she is not Rachel's Sassy Black Friend. "Cassie is quieter than Rachel, more peaceful, like she always understands everything on some different, more mystical level." She lacks every dimension of sass, and has her own stuff going on apart from being Rachel's friend. I really wish this wasn't so impressive, but it is. Still. After almost twenty years.
3. "For one thing, she's usually wearing jeans and a plaid shirt, or something else real casual." Cassie is not traditionally feminine, but she is presented as being romantically desirable - as evidenced by the fact that the main character of the series, this regular boy who likes regular boy things like basketball and video games, desires her. And not in spite of her butchiness; there is no makeover montage where Jake doesn't notice her until Rachel takes off Cassie's glasses and puts down her hair (metaphorically speaking). Jake likes Cassie for who she is now. "She had [her hair] longer for a while, but then she went back to short, which I like." (Emphasis mine.) If you have ever been a tomboyish preteen girl, you know how huge this is. If you haven't, I assure you: it is huge.

Jake, having already established himself as a bit of a white knight by saving Tobias from those bullies off-screen, doubles down on his Lawful Good alignment by offering to walk the girls home - for their protection. You know, 'cause they're girls and all. Big mistake to say that in front of Rachel, who gets ready to tear him a new one until Cassie artfully ends the conflict without hurting anyone's feelings. This exchange nicely illustrates several important personality traits: Rachel's independence, Jake's sometimes clueless good intentions, and Cassie's talent as peacemaker.

And so the five kids walk home at night, cutting across a highway and an abandoned construction site because they're thirteen years old and therefore immortal. Jake's parents have warned him not to take the shortcut through the old construction site, but for some reason they're fine with him crossing a highway. (I'm not even exaggerating: "So anyway, we crossed the road and headed into the abandoned construction site. It was a big area, surrounded on two sides by trees, with the highway separating it from the mall area.") I remember growing up in the sidewalk-less exurbs, where the furthest I could get without a car was a nearby convenience store, and my mom didn't even like me walking there for fear that I'd be run over. Either the Animorphs live in a much more walkable neighborhood or their parents don't pay too much attention to traffic patterns.

Anyway, instead of getting hit by a car, the kids see a spaceship land directly in front of them. Tobias sees it first, because he's looking up at the sky while he's walking, because he's Tobias. It's funny - I clearly remember the ship crashing, and yet in this book, it very slowly and deliberately lands. It's got scorch marks on it, and it's even a bit melted, but it's still functional, apparently. I'm not sure how Elfangor got so hurt when his fighter seems to still be in pretty good condition. He probably could've kept fighting, but then again with the Dome ship destroyed there's probably no real hope. But now I'm getting ahead of myself.

Rachel suggests trying to communicate with whatever's inside, even though they all agree that the aliens probably don't speak English. Tobias tries anyway. The first words he ever speaks to his father are: "Please, come out. We won't hurt you." No, I'm not teary-eyed, why do you ask?

The alien could have said, [Duh, you're a gaggle of unarmed children and I'm in a goddamn Andalite fighter,] but instead he's all tactful and says, [I know.] The kids reel at the experience of thought-speak. Tobias again asks the alien inside to come out, and assures him that they won't be frightened. The alien steps out of the fighter, giving the kids their first look at an Andalite: blue centaurs with scorpion tails, eyestalks, and three vertical slits where a human mouth and nose would be. I've read that K.A. originally designed Andalites to look like your typical greys, to make it easier to adapt the series to TV. But Scholastic told her to be more creative, so out of spite, she designed the craziest-looking aliens she could possibly think of. I actually really like how weird the aliens are, and in fact feel like they could get weirder: considering all the diversity of lifeforms on this planet, why should life on other planets look anything like this one particular species of hairless ape?

Anyway, the alien (Elfangor) is clearly trying very hard to keep it together in front of the children (Andalite pride, yo), but he staggers and (despite Tobias's attempt to help him) falls into the dirt, revealing an awful burn covering half his right side. Cassie immediately goes into junior-vet mode, ordering Jake to rip up his shirt for bandages with no ulterior motives whatsoever, I'm sure.

CASSIE: Quick, Jake! Take off your shirt and rip it up!
JAKE: But... you're wearing a flannel shirt over your overalls. Maybe you could rip up your overshirt, and you'd still -
CASSIE: Dammit, Jake, there's no time to explain. It has to be your shirt.

But Elfangor cock-blocks her (vulva-blocks her?) and tells them all that the wound is fatal. Now, a lot of people criticize this scene: why doesn't Elfangor just morph into something else, then de-morph and completely heal? But I think it makes sense. He is very badly wounded, to the point where he's dying. Morphing takes a lot of concentration, energy, and time. He knows he doesn't have much time before the Yeerks follow him down to the planet's surface and kill him. He knows the Dome ship has been destroyed, so there's no point in continuing to fight anyway. And his little fighter's not getting back to the Andalite homeworld by itself. Basically, he can spend several minutes morphing and de-morphing to save himself, only to be immediately killed by Visser Three, or he can save what little energy he has left to tell this random assortment of mini-humans what the hell is going on on their planet, thereby possibly saving Earth. I think it's a pretty rational decision.

Anyway, Elfangor drops a hot, steaming load of exposition on the kids. Yeerks are evil, brain-stealing alien slugs who are invading Earth. Andalites like him are the good guys who fight the Yeerks across the galaxy. Elfangor gives Earth a year, tops, before the Yeerks have taken complete control. You know what kind of gets me about this scene? He tells them all this before he remembers that he has the Escafil device in his fighter. Which means that his plan was to warn them and then die, without giving them any tools whatsoever to fight this horrific war he just told them about. Kind of a dick move, Elfangor.

In any case, he does eventually remember, and sends Jake in to get the "small blue box, very plain." Or, rather, he wants someone to do it, and everybody kind of decides it's going to be Jake because he's the paladin. It's certainly not going to be Tobias, who wants to stay with Elfangor and comfort him and OH GOD THE FEELS. Jake works up the nerve thanks to Cassie's encouragement, steps into the ship, and collects the box. Then something catches his eye.

It was a small, three-dimensional picture - four Andalites, standing all together, looking like a strange gathering of deer with solemn faces. Two of them looked very small kids. I realized that this was a picture of the Andalite's family.

It filled me with sadness to think that here he was, dying, a million miles from his family. Dying because he had tried to protect the people of Earth. I felt a small flame of anger against the Yeerks, or Controllers, or whatever they were, for causing this.

Although the picture doesn't much make sense given what we'll later find out about Elfangor - his little brother is way younger than him, and he doesn't have an Andalite wife and family of his own - it's a very touching moment. And it establishes a theme that's going to be very prominent in this series: family as motivation. More on that later.

So Jake comes back with the blue box, and Elfangor tells them he can give them the power to turn into other creatures, which will help give them a slight edge against the Yeerks. He asks if they want to receive this power, and Marco's all, "HELL NO" and Cassie's all, "HELL YES" and Jakes all, "Let's take a vote" and then the Yeerks show up. Oops.

So really quickly, as the Yeerk ship is descending (can't they see what's going on down there? Whatever), the kids make a decision. Everybody but Marco wants to take the power, and Jake's waffling because he waffles a lot in this book, but eventually Tobias kind of pushes him into saying yes, so they touch the box and get the power and Elfangor warns them not to stay in morph for more than two hours or they'll be trapped, and then they all run away to hide behind "a low, crumbled wall." Except for Tobias, who gets a poke in the head from Elfangor and falls over. But then he joins the rest of them.

Notably, the book never mentions what happens to the blue box. The kids don't grab it. Elfangor's too weak to put it back in his ship (or, uh, carefully tuck it into a space between cinderblocks), and if he hides it in the dirt or something, Jake at least doesn't notice. It just kind of disappears. This will become a pretty major thorn in my side 20 books later. But I'll get to that when I get to it.

From their hiding spot, the kids see the Bug fighters land, followed by the Blade ship, with disintegrates an earthmover that's in the way. Hork-Bajir and Taxxons come out, and Elfangor  explains to the kids in thought-speak what they are and that Hork-Bajir are peaceful and good but Taxxons are total assholes. Visser Three steps out in his Andalite host body, radiating evil. Even as Visser Three approaches Elfangor to kill him, he continues explaining to the kids who he is and what's going on, which is pretty badass.

Visser Three provides more exposition via Bond villain gloating, then morphs into a horrible monster and eats Elfangor alive. Jake jumps up and yells, "You filthy-" but the other kids (including Marco) pull him down and tell him to shut up or he'll get them all killed. A bunch of Human-Controllers laugh, including a voice that seems familiar to Jake, but before he can figure out who it is, Marco vomits, which attracts the attention of a nearby Hork-Bajir. The fact that they've been talking more or less nonstop this entire time is not enough to attract its attention, but Marco's just that loud a vomiter, I guess. Also, Marco was apparently fine when Elfangor was being eaten, but the sound of human laughter is just too much for him. Whatever.

Anyway, Jake tells the others to split up, and he and Rachel lead the Hork-Bajir away from the slower, more out-of-shape characters. Rachel baits the Hork-Bajir with swear words because she's Rachel. But they all make it out alive and run home.

The next morning, Tobias shows up at Jake's house all psyched because he turned into his cat and it was awesome. Tobias's tragic home life is described to the reader, as though that were necessary to explain why a 13-year-old boy would be excited by having quasi-magical powers that let him turn into any animal he touched. Jake is still pretty sure he was a dream, because he's in denial. Tobias morphs into Dude (the cat) to prove it and Jake still thinks it might be a dream, but if it's not a dream, he wants no part of it.

Tobias, on the other hand, is super into this, and insists that Jake get onboard.

"But we'll need you, Jake. You most of all."

"Why me?"

He hesitated. "Geez, Jake, don't you understand? I know what I can do and what I can't do. I can't make plans and tell people what to do. I'm not the leader. You are."

I laughed rudely. "I'm not the leader of anything."

He just looked at me with those deep, troubled eyes - eyes I can now see only in my memory.

"Yes, Jake, you are our leader. You are the one who can bring us all together and help us defeat the Controllers. We have the ability to be much more than we are, to have the stealth of a cat, and... and the eyes of eagles, and the sense of smell of a dog, and... and the speed of a horse or a cheetah. We're going to need it all, if we have any hope of holding out against the Controllers."

Jake reluctantly admits that he is awesome, and morphs his dog Homer. Through Tobias and Jake morphing their pets, we see how morphing works: the time it requires, the concentration it requires, how disgusting it is, the ease of slipping into the animal's instincts. We also get some nice foreshadowing: Homer's powerful sense of smell detects something weird about Jake's older brother, Tom.

Jake arranges for everybody to meet up at Cassie's barn. Tobias takes off, saying he'll meet Jake there later. Meanwhile, Jake - now human again - goes into the kitchen to talk to Tom. They used to be pretty close, but lately Tom's been spending all his time with this club called The Sharing. Tom also doesn't particularly care that Jake didn't make the team, which is weird, because he used to eat, sleep, and breathe basketball until he joined The Sharing. He tells Jake basketball isn't important, not like The Sharing. Which Jake should totally join.

Because Jake doesn't care that Tom appears to have been brainwashed by a cult, he does his Saturday chores and then rides his bike to Cassie's farm on the edge of town. By this point, I'm getting seriously jealous of how easily these kids can travel around town on their own. They must live in one of those pre-1950's suburbs, from the days before pedestrianism was basically outlawed. But enough of my exurban resentment: Cassie lives on what used to be a functional farm, but which is now home to the Wildlife Rehabilitation Center, a place where her veterinarian dad heals injured wild animals before releasing them back into the wild. It's the perfect place to acquire new morphs and plan new missions because apparently, even though it's Cassie's dad's primary place of business, he is never there. Cassie's mom is also a veterinarian, but she works at The Gardens (basically Busch Gardens) with bigger, more exotic animals. Hurray for convenience!

Jake is the last person to show up, because he's the leader. Rachel shows him an article she found in the morning paper. Apparently, a number of people saw what looked like flying saucers around the abandoned construction site. Cops arrived on the scene to find a bunch of teenagers shooting off fireworks. The kids ran off. Police are offering a reward for any information on the random teenagers, like you do. Yep, the Yeerks have pretty clearly infiltrated the police, which convinces the kids that they've probably infiltrated every other powerful organization.

Marco kind of freaks out, pointing out that they could all die and suggesting that they all forget this ever happened and never use their powers. He alludes to the death of his mother about two years ago, which sent his dad into a spiral of depression, but he doesn't explicitly say that's why he doesn't want to risk his life, because he doesn't want the others to think he's weak. So instead, the others (except for Jake, who knows what's up) just think he's kind of a cowardly asshole, which is so much better. Oh, Marco.

Then a horse shows up. The horse is Cassie. She's been at this morphing thing all morning, and has managed to turn the hideous process into artistic expression, making herself look like an Andalite as she demorphs. She also found out how to morph tight clothing, even though spandex doesn't have DNA oh whatever just go with it. But while she's demorphing, a police officer shows up to reinforce the point that they are serious about finding these kids with the fireworks. I don't know why he decides to drive all the way to this random farm on the edge of town to look for teenagers; I assume Cassie's family is the only black family in town, so he shows up there regularly to intimidate them for no reason. Only thing worse than a Yeerk cop is a racist Yeerk cop. Anyway, they all block Cassie's demorphing with their bodies. Racist Yeerk Cop gets suspicious and tells the kids to stand aside, and luckily Cassie's fully human by that time, so there's nothing weird here but a black girl who loves gymnastics and being barefoot.

"We want these kids," the policeman said. "We want them real bad. See, it was dangerous what they did. Could have been someone hurt. So we want to find the kids."

Racist Yeerk Cop tells Jake he should join The Sharing, because he was being too subtle before, and once he leaves the kids reiterate that there are Controllers in the police department and this proves that they can't trust any authority figure, or anyone for that matter. They already knew that from the newspaper article, so this scene wasn't actually necessary, but whatever.

Anyway, they talk amongst themselves about what to do with this knowledge and this power, if anything. And here we learn some interesting things about these characters and their motivations. One thing that leapt out at me during this re-read was that the three male Animorphs are all motivated, in one way or another, by family. Marco is strongly against doing anything that might risk his life, because his father couldn't handle losing him. Tobias is strongly for fighting the Yeerks, because he doesn't have a real family: his home life is so terrible he has nothing else going for him. Jake will eventually catch on that his brother is a Controller, and so that becomes his motivation.

Cassie's motivation is strangely childish: she pretty much just likes animals, so she wants to turn into them. She's not really thinking about the Yeerk threat, or how they'll have to fight and kill other sentient creatures - including, possibly, humans. Knowing that in just a few books, she'll end up guilt-stricken over killing a termite queen, this is kind of shocking. She starts talking about how they could use this power to save endangered species, and Tobias has to remind her that, hey, there's a war on. She doesn't really respond to that. I find it ironic that the two characters who are most enthusiastic in the beginning are the gentlest, most peaceful ones: the ones who will be the most hesitant when it comes to the actual, nasty business of war.

Rachel and Jake haven't found their motivation yet. Jake waffles a lot, whereas Rachel bounces between fighting and not fighting, seeming equally passionate about each one until she changes her mind again. 

"Okay, rule number one," Rachel announced firmly. "We don't do anything to attract attention. We have to be secret about everything. Especially morphing." ...

... "Maybe Marco is right," Rachel said. "This is too big for us. We're just kids. We need to find someone important to tell this to. Someone we can trust."

Rachel's the one who calls for a vote. Already her take-charge personality is showing, although she seems strangely eager to take orders from Jake. (That won't last long.) Everyone is eager to take orders from Jake for some reason. He has no idea what to do, and seems as baffled as I am by this universal belief that there needs to be a leader, and it needs to be him.

One of the things I don't like about this book is how Jake's leadership abilities are told more than they're shown. It would have been more effective if Jake got onboard early (maybe Tom is at the construction site with the rest of the Human-Controllers, and Jake sees him there, giving him his motivation to fight right off the bat) and was shown uniting the rest of the kids, maybe with an inspiring speech or something. Instead, he spends half the book waffling, lacking any motivation to accept the call to action and instead being told outright by other people that he is The Leader, though there's little actual evidence to suggest that he'd be good at leading anyone.

I may be personally biased on this front, as I am an anarchist and I don't really see why a small group of kids with exactly the same amount of knowledge and experience with regards to Yeerks and morphing and war tactics require a leader to tell them what to do. Can't they just use consensus to make decisions? They seem to do that anyway, at least in this book, looking to Jake largely as a tie-breaker. But they seem to take it for granted that they need a leader, without really thinking about why. Even Cassie - the liberal idealist - and Rachel - the headstrong independent one - don't question it.

Anyway, when Rachel ultimately votes to fight, it seems to be primarily out of spite against Marco, who is being an asshole to Tobias for no reason. This shows that she's protective of Tobias (foreshadowing!) and prone to jumping into things without really thinking. Her long-term motivation for fighting won't develop until the second book.

Cassie notices that things are getting a little tense, so she suggests they hold off on making their final decision until they've given it more thought. Jake and Marco go back to Jake's house to play yet more video games. One of the few things the TV show did right was that they changed this scene from Jake and Marco playing video games to Jake and Marco playing basketball in Jake's driveway. It shows Jake's love of - and talent for - basketball, and also shows that the boys have more than one hobby. Anyway, back in the book, Tom shows up of course and talks about the teenagers and the fireworks and tells them to join The Sharing. Marco points out to Jake what is by now painfully obvious to the reader: Tom is a Controller.

Jake punches Marco because he's in denial. He spends much of the book in denial over one thing or another, and while I realize that most people would have a hard time believing that aliens were invading (and that your own brother was infested with one of them), it's getting rather tedious. Luckily, Tobias quickly shows up at the window in the form of a red-tailed hawk. Jake tells him to morph back, reminding him that he can't stay in a morph for more than two hours. (Foreshadowing!) Tobias hesitates - which could be more foreshadowing, but also could reflect his desire to not be randomly naked in Jake's room for the second time that day. He turns human again, borrows some ill-fitting clothes from Jake, and waxes rhapsodic about the wonders of flight.

"Tobias, how on Earth did you do a hawk morph?" I demanded.

"There's an injured hawk right there in Cassie's barn," he said. "There's this cool osprey, too, but I decided on the hawk."

"How did you fly if the hawk you morphed from was injured?" I wondered.

Marco shook his head pityingly. "Jake, do you pay any attention in biology class? DNA has nothing to do with some injury. The DNA wasn't broken. Just a wing."

YEAH, Jake, it's basic biology, like morphing spandex. Idiot. Jake reminds Tobias for the second time not to stay in morph longer than two hours. (Repetitive foreshadowing!) Tobias tells them he's already looking for the Yeerk pool, which Elfangor told him about in his pokey-forehead-infodump. He's already raring to go find this Yeerk pool and blow it up. Marco stops being an asshole to Tobias just long enough to point out that maybe, just maybe, this club The Sharing is a cover for the Yeerk invasion. He's a smart one. Marco dares Jake to investigate The Sharing and see that he's right, that Tom really is a Controller. "Let's see how much you want to [fight] when it turns out it's your own brother you have to destroy." Then, before Jake can get too mad at him, he brings up his mom's death again.

Marco will eventually become the joker of the group. I will love his jokes and his witty banter with Rachel, I will empathize with his pain, and I will love him. But so far, none of that is visible or even really hinted at. He's just acting like a jerk, especially to Tobias. In my headcanon, Marco's gay and secretly in love with Jake, and he's just jealous of how much time Tobias has been spending naked in Jake's room.

Anyway, they decide to scope out The Sharing. Jake tells Tom that he, Marco, Rachel, and Cassie are all interested in attending a meeting. Tobias will be there in bird form, to spy from above. Tom is super-psyched. They go to that night's Sharing meeting, which is a bonfire on the beach with volleyball and barbecue and people chilling out and having a good time. Tom tells Jake it's even better as a full member, but before he can offer Jake a free E-Meter audit, his face starts to contort into a look of terror. Then it changes back, and he says he has to go to the separate meeting for full members.

This finally convinces Jake that his brother is a Controller. He decides to spy on the full members meeting in Homer form, guessing that "they won't worry about some stray dog that's walking along the beach." He wanders around the beach trying to look inconspicuous, but with his sharp dog hearing overhears Tom and the other Controllers (including the assistant principal of their middle school, bearer of the strangely familiar voice Jake heard at the construction site) talking about how they need to find those kids who were at the construction site. Tom says: "[I]t might be the one who's my brother, Jake. I know he goes through the construction site sometimes. That's why I brought him here tonight. So we could either make him ours... or kill him."

Luckily, Assistant Principal Chapman tells Tom there won't be any killing at Sharing meetings, since that would draw too much attention. Instead they'll sit and wait for the kids to talk about what they saw, then make their move.

But Jake is still so horrified by this that he escapes into the dog's instinctive happiness for a while. (Foreshadowing!) But soon he hears Racist Yeerk Cop hassling Cassie for getting too close to the full members meeting. He lets her off with a warning, and she tells Jake she was just checking to make sure he was okay. Aww. They go back to the others and Jake fills them in. Everybody is now determined to fight the Yeerks, except Marco. Oh, Marco.

Jake decides to do some spying on Chapman. Cassie finds him a green anole who lives in her barn - not as a patient, just sort of there - and Monday at school, he crawls into his locker and morphs it. He instantly freaks out, overpowered by the lizard's instincts, runs around like crazy and eats a spider. Then Chapman steps on his tail, cutting it clean off. This is all very horrific and gross, but Jake manages to get it together and follow Chapman into a janitor's closet. And so Jake finds an entrance to the Yeerk pool: hidden behind a revolving wall in a janitor's closet in his own middle school. A little later on in the series, they'll find a second entrance in the mall. It's all a nice little dig at suburban conformity, which I appreciated as a suburban middle schooler.

That afternoon at the mall, Jake tells the rest of the group what he found out and says he wants to go down into the Yeerk pool and save Tom. Tobias and Rachel are in. Marco reluctantly agrees, just to rescue Tom, and then he's out. Cassie goes off on this weird tangent about shamanism. Rachel points out that they need more powerful morphs if they're going to fight, and suggests acquiring them at The Gardens. And this is where Marco provides the title of the series and the title of this re-read:

"Oh, I'm sure we could talk them into letting us in for nothing," Marco said. "Just tell them we're Animorphs."

"Tell them we're what?" Rachel asked.

"Idiot teenagers with a death wish," Marco said.

"Animorphs." I tried the word out. It sounded okay.

So they take a bus to the Gardens. Tobias says he doesn't want to acquire any battle morphs, because he's happy with his hawk morph and doesn't want to turn into anything else. Rachel says that's a bad idea, but no one else seems to notice or care. Cassie sneaks them behind the exhibits. Marco finally acquires his first morph, a gorilla, and starts getting kind of into it, suggesting that they head to the big animal exhibits for real firepower. Just then, security guards notice them and everybody runs like crazy and Marco hijacks a little golf cart and "Yakety Sax" plays in the background. Jake and Marco duck into an exhibit at random to get away from the zoo cops. Unfortunately, it's the tiger exhibit.

Jake acquires the tiger to put him into a trance, but when they try to escape, a second tiger attacks. Luckily, the boys manage to climb out of the exhibit and hide in a crowd. They meet up with Tobias and the girls near the front gates. Apparently, they'd "lost the guards easily, and had just gone on acquiring morphs while Marco and [Jake] were risking [their] lives in the tiger habitat," except that it seems Cassie never acquired a battle morph. Her battle morph ends up being a gray wolf, which everyone morphs in a later book. I don't know if this is plot convenience or an extremely subtle sign of her discomfort with violence. Let's be charitable and say it's the second thing.

Jake goes home for dinner and spends just enough time at home to remind his parents that he is alive, then immediately leaves again for the Yeerk pool. Tom is also going to the Yeerk pool that night. Cassie is mysteriously missing, and Tobias is already a hawk. So things are going swimmingly. They sneak into the school and soon see Racist Yeerk Cop dragging Cassie into the janitor's closet. There's no time for Tobias to demorph, so three of them head into the Yeerk pool pretending to be Human-Controllers and Tobias just... tries to look inconspicuous?

Turns out that the Yeerk pool is enormous, and horrifying. There's a gigantic lake filled with Yeerks, surrounded by cages for the unwilling Controllers and some nice couches and TVs for the willing Human-Controllers. Tobias uses his hawk eyes and assures Jake that Tom is in one of the cages, screaming at the guards. But RYC has dragged Cassie to the pier over the pool where the hosts are re-infested. And the kids are spotted.

Rachel turns into an elephant and kills a Taxxon and possibly a Human-Controller, and appears to love every minute of it. Jake and Marco use the tiger and gorilla morphs they acquired earlier that day to kill Hork-Bajir and release a bunch of free hosts - including Tom. At this point, none of them appear concerned about the morality of killing sentient beings, even though Elfangor specifically told them that Hork-Bajir are gentle creatures, enslaved by the Yeerks against their will. They're kind of on a power trip.

So Cassie's about to be infested and Jake, Marco, and Rachel are all too busy killing Controllers to help her. Tobias flies down and uses his talons to claw the eyes of the Hork-Bajir-Controller restraining her. Cassie morphs into a horse and they're all about to escape when Visser Three shows up. He figures that they're Andalites who survived the battle, and morphs into a different horrible monster from the one he morphed to kill Elfangor. This one has eight heads and shoots balls of fire.

Realizing that they're Level 1 heroes and Visser Three just morphed a Level 50 monster, the kids decide to run like hell. Rachel morphs back into human form because elephants can't climb stairs, and somehow Visser Three doesn't notice as he's hurling fireballs at them. Tom heroically/stupidly attacks Visser Three with his bare hands, Visser Three throws him off the stairs, Jake goes nuts and bites and claws at Visser Three, and then they all run up the stairs and escape.

Well, except for Tom.

And all but one of the other freed Controllers.

But all the Animorphs manage to escape!

Well...

[I hid in the cavern for a while,] he said. [They didn't see me. But I had to stay out of sight till I could get out. Jake... it took too long. Too long. More than two hours.]

I just stared at him. At his laser-focus eyes, at his wicked beak and sharp talons. And at his wings. At the broad, powerful wings that let him fly.

[I guess this is me from now on,] Tobias said.

I knew there were tears falling down my cheeks, but I didn't care anymore.

[It's okay, Jake. Like you said, we're alive.]

I went to the window and looked up at the stars. Somewhere up there, around one of those cold, twinkling stars, was the Andalite home world. Somewhere up there was... hope.

[They'll come,] Tobias said. [The Andalites will come. And until then...]

I nodded and wiped away my tears. "Yeah," I said. "Until then, we fight."

Also, Cassie kills a cop. Seriously.

And Cassie had gotten away clean. It had been the suspicious Controller policeman who had grabbed her. He was the only Controller to know her name, where she lived, and that she had been spying on The Sharing.

Cassie said we didn't have to worry about him anymore. She didn't want to talk about what had happened to him.

...'kay...?

Commentary:
Most series take some time to find their footing, and Animorphs is no exception. The first book felt pretty uneven. The author takes a while to hammer down Jake and Marco's characters in particular. Marco doesn't really settle into his personality until the second half of the book; until then, he kind of comes off as a whiny asshole who uses his mom's death as an excuse to bully Tobias. Jake spends much of the book befuddled and in denial. Presumably, he's meant to be a stand-in for the reader, but the result is that he lacks personality. He comes off as a kind of nice, kind of dense guy whom everyone looks to for leadership for no apparent reason. Cassie's character is generally consistent, but we see none of her trademark pacifism... and then there's that cop thing. Her whole subplot with being kidnapped wasn't really necessary to get the kids into the Yeerk pool; Tobias wanted to go blow it up and Jake wanted to save his brother, so the motivation was there without Racist Yeerk Cop. So that whole thing was just pointless and awkward.

A lot of the dialogue was clumsier than I'm used to with Animorphs. Like with this woman in the Yeerk pool: "You filth, let me go! Let me go! I am a free woman! You can't keep doing this! I am not a slave! Let me go! ... Help! Oh, please, someone help. Help us all!" Becoming a Controller is horrifying, as we'll see very clearly in book #6. But I wish our first glimpse of a human host's anguish and rage wasn't... that. It was just so wooden. Also, the relationship between Rachel and Tobias moves way too quickly for my taste. It seems like they go from barely knowing each other to basically being boyfriend-and-girlfriend in about a week. Jake and Cassie's shy, understated attraction toward each other feels a lot more authentic.

Sometimes in a work of fiction, there's a secondary character that you can feel is actually supposed to be the main character. This is Tobias, especially in this book. Who sees the spaceship first? Tobias. Who feels a mysterious, special kinship with the alien? Tobias. Who is the only one to get an extra mental infodump from said alien? Tobias. Who's the first to morph? Tobias. Who's the first to get onboard with the war? Tobias. Who heroically saves Cassie, by himself, in the book's climactic battle? Tobias. Who becomes a nothlit, setting up the single most compelling, heartbreaking storyline in the entire series? Tobias.

That's before we even get to the part where he's an orphan who's secretly the son of a prince and is mistreated and misunderstood until he is given special powers and his true destiny is revealed. I mean, come on. The guy practically has PROTAGONIST tattooed on his forehead. Whereas it feels like, for Jake, this whole intergalactic war thing is just a distraction from his true destiny as Associate Director of Human Resources for a mid-sized box company. He's a nice kid, but he doesn't feel like main character material, and he is not the right character to narrate this book.

Which brings me to the central conceit of the series. Each book is narrated in first-person by a different Animorph, in a tone that suggests that they're writing this all down and publishing it so that humanity can know the truth. Reading it as a kid, I enjoyed the immediacy this lent the story. The lack of geographic detail helped reinforce the paranoia (it could be my town!), and the way these characters entrust you with this knowledge, you can't help but feel closer to them.

On the other hand, it objectively doesn't make sense. Their big tactical advantage is that Visser Three thinks they're Andalite bandits, so outing themselves as human in a mass-market paperback series (or blog, or whatever) is basically self-sabotage. Even if they don't give their last names or where they live, the details they do provide are more than enough to track them down. It's the town with the giant Yeerk pool underneath, with the abandoned construction site where Elfangor died. They go to the school whose assistant principal is Chapman. The parents of one of them run the Wildlife Rehabilitation Center, which is also where they meet. So the story might have been better told without that gimmick.

Speaking of which...

Where do the Animorphs live?
I know that, towards the very end of the series, Jake finally gives up on the whole "we can't tell you where we live" shtick and reveals that the whole story took place somewhere in southern California. That disappointed me, because I'd figured that they lived near Washington D.C.: you know, one of those small towns in northern Virginia or eastern Maryland that had been gobbled up by sprawl and become bedroom communities for government workers. That explained to my satisfaction why the whole Yeerk invasion seemed centered around their particular town: it was actually centered on the capital of the most powerful nation on Earth, which also happened to be within commuting distance of the kids. So anyway, I thought while I do this re-read I'd keep track of hints the books drop as to where the story takes place. Is it consistent with southern California? Or northern Virginia? Or anyplace, really?

This book offers several clues as to the story's setting:
1. They live near an ocean, in a climate where the beach is still a nice place to hang out during the school year.
2. They live near a zoological theme park, of which there are vanishingly few in the country. There is one in Virginia, but not in the D.C. area (drats). But none of them are in southern California either - although one is in northern California, near San Francisco. Two of them are in Florida, and The Gardens is pretty obviously based on Busch Gardens, in Tampa Bay.
3. Jake morphs a green anole that lives in Cassie's barn. Its geographic range is limited to the southeastern United States. It has apparently been introduced to southern California, but only many years after this book was published and not in any significant numbers.
4. Cassie mentions that she "shredded" her coat trying to morph it and doesn't know what she'll do come winter.

Every clue except #4 is consistent with it being set in Florida. Though Cassie could have been describing a light coat. Seems like so far, the most likely setting is Tampa Bay, Florida, with Williamsburg, Virginia (home of Busch Gardens Williamsburg) also a possibility.

Phew! Well, that's book one, and I may have gone a bit overboard with the recapping. You can read it for yourself here. Come back next week for kitty-cats when I review Animorphs #2: The Visitor!