We can't tell you who we are. Or where we live. It’s too risky, and we’ve got to be careful. Really careful. So we don’t trust anyone. Because if they find us . . . well, we just won’t let them find us.
The thing you should know is that everyone is in really big trouble. Yeah. Even you.
Hi. So, here’s the deal. I started reading Animorphs when I was about nine or ten. The series, which ran from 1996 to 2001, was about a year old by then, but the first book I read, purchased from my middle-school book fair, coupled with the descriptions of some kid in my fourth(?)-grade class, made such an impression on me that I devoured all the books I’d missed and loyally stuck with the series until it ended a few months before I turned fourteen.
As anyone who’s talked to me at any length while I’m drunk will attest, for most of my grade school days I considered Animorphs to be the finest young adult book series ever written. Its major themes of, to quote Wikipedia, “horror, war, dehumanization, sanity, morality, innocence, leadership, and growing up” inspired and entertained me more than almost anything else I read during that time. My memory of its literary merit continued unabated for several years, until I made two separate attempts to reread the series during high school only to give up in utter boredom and disillusionment a third of the way through.
You don’t care about any of that, though. You’re just here because blogging is awesome omg amirite? So I thought I’d get in on the action by rereading the entire Animorphs canon and giving my thoughts on it book by book as I proceed.
I’m not flinching. It’s all getting filtered through me: all four Megamorphs, all four “Chronicles,” and all fifty-four (oh, God) books of the main series. I might even do those two stupid choose-your-own adventure books, if I’m not sick enough of the series by then to weep at the thought of devoting any time to books that don’t even affect the main continuity (please, Lord, let me be sick of it by then).
Anyway, I’ll be commenting on a variety of factors, such as the exponential deterioration of my sanity. I’ll be talking about how each work stands on its own, fits in the continuity of the series, prefigures what is to come, contradicts what has come before, and so on. I’ll also try to keep track of things like planets and alien species and who has what morph, if only because I like making lists of meaningless things, such as plot holes and continuity errors in a fourteen-year-old series of children’s books.
I’ll try not to be too hard on these books since they are, after all, written for children, but they were also violent and psychologically dark as fuck, which was what impressed me so much when I was myself a child reading them for the first time.
The first review, and a step into a huge world and a long, long endeavor, is soon to follow. “Soon” meaning whenever I finish the first book; I’ve been whittling away at it for close to two months now. Reading is fun, so stay tuned for some more of it!
