The Departure is my favorite book in the main series. It pulls together tensions that have been building since the start, and bends the book structure to achieve something magnificent, poignant, and challenging in an amazing way.

I've been looking forward to reading this again since I started this re-read/review thing. There are a couple of later books that come close to being my favorite (and I reserve the right for one of them to topple this one), but I've really gotten to appreciate how much groundwork in the previous books comes together to make this story feel inevitable, necessary, and brilliant.

The Discovery is part 1 of 3 of the David sequence. I like this approach to telling a longer story by connecting three books more tightly than the rest of the continuity. The Animorphs have to deal with more exposure while protecting world leaders.

Knowing what's to come, by comparison this is pretty light. The rest of this sequence is going to be very dark and deal with some very heavy stuff, but for now there's a new element and he doesn't work well with Marco.

The Threat is a solid book 2 of the David trilogy. Jake is trying to be a good leader while handling the newest member during a difficult and high-stakes mission. This also has one of the scariest almost-nothlit moments so far.

This trilogy in the middle of the main series used to be extremely stressful for me to read (and it's still pretty stressful). David shakes up the usual dynamic, pokes a lot of buttons... and then gets very, very dark. His moral code doesn't fit well with the others, but in a dark way. I was going to compare him to Rachel, but it's not a good fit right now, and a later book will do that for me in a spectacular fashion.

The ending, oh goodness, the ending is rough.

The Solution concludes the David trilogy with a long look at Rachel's role within the team, and how much Jake is willing to use her ruthlessness and Cassie's understanding of people to do a terrible thing.

Rachel is grappling with how Jake sees her and how much he is willing to use her as the ruthless one. Marco is ruthless in an efficient way (this has been discussed previously in the series), but Rachel is ruthless in a reckless way, and this book both shows that and highlights how she can be calculating too.

Tobias tries to decide how to be himself & whether that means being human, hawk, or a strange mix of both. The Tobias/Rachel storyline is developing in a really cool way, w/some things said explicitly instead of heavily implied.

The layers of deception and pretense are very thick. The titles usually work on several levels, but wow, this one does a lot. There are tricks, traps, pseudonyms, several kinds of impostor syndrome...

The Andalite Chronicles is the story of Aximili's brother, Elfangor, how he fought, hid, lived/loved, and returned as a hero. We learn more about Taxxons, Alloran's fate, and why Visser Three hates Elfangor. A solid prequel/midquel at the same time, don't miss it.

I'm appreciating on this read-through how the story threads pick up from The Hork-Bajir Chronicles to the Andalite Chronicles to create the conditions in the background when the whole Animorphs series starts. These should definitely be read where I have placed them if it's your first readthrough, but it is possible to read this as a prequel to the entire series if it's not your first time.

I really like Elfangor's story and how much it communicates by what he does and does not assume is normal. There really is a different perspective to the story when the narrators are not human, and this one is very well done.

As a mix between a prequel and a midquel, this is difficult to discuss without spoiling major revelations in the main series, but if you really don't care about series spoilers this could be read on its own as a self-contained (and really great) story.

*I'm no longer planning to read the sequel. I've left my original review intact below.

Ancestral Night is an intimate exploration of identity and personhood which plays out across light-ans, oscillating smoothly between space battles, personal crises, and odes to cats in zero-g. I hope we get more in this universe, or one next door.

I enjoy portrayals of AI and aliens that make them feel like more than just human thoughts in different skins (or no skin, as the case may be). What I was not expecting, but I received, was a portrayal of a human whose mindset was so adjusted and influenced by technology that they sometimes felt alien. Haimey never crosses that line completely, but flits up to it enough that it made the narration feel precarious, like at any moment she could be a wholly different being. Part of what I appreciate is that this book engages with that idea in an interesting way (one which I don't intend to spoil). I like the answers it reaches, they feel actionable in a personal way, if not at a societal level.

As a longer book, the pacing is well-managed. It dragged a bit in the first third because there's a lot of establish, but then it catches momentum and has a good balance of contemplation and action. Because the narrator (Haimey) is encountering a lot of new techology it avoids a lot of easy opportunities to infodump (which is always a temptation in sci-fi). Watching her figure out how everything works is much more interesting that being explained to, even if the end result is the same. For the sections where she already knows what's going on, the explanations are a lot closer to the ideal where she just tells us what she's doing and we figure out the closest analog from context clues (e.g., "I got in the car and pulled out of the parking space" vs "I undid the latch on my conveyance powered by internal combustion and lowered my form onto the padded and adjustable frame...").

I like the world built here, and I'm excited that it's supposed to be a part of a series. I definitely plan to come back for more when it's available.

Visser by K. A. Applegate has to balance two competing ideas: Hatred for a main enemy of the Animorphs, with some sympathy for her. The explanations are moving and the story is very good but we are not endeared to her. It also sets up the history of the Yeerk invasion on Earth.

It's a very good explanation of how we arrived at this point, but even Visser One's explanation of her own actions are not enough to make her host care about her. Parts of it are things that we might accept from a human as reasons for her actions, but if they were really her motiviation then it wouldn't have made sense for her to call the Yeerk Empire to Earth in the first place. There's something interesting there, both in how the cognitive dissonance is portrayed, and in how each step makes sense with the steps before and after. Even with this, the path of her actions meanders wildly between something understandable to (and even approved of by) her fellow Yeerks, and something that is very, very, human.

Cassie struggles to relate to the parents' perspective on the war. The Animorphs expand their numbers. Tom and Jake have a showdown and Cassie intervenes. I really like the new Animorphs, and having this much shift really ramps things up.

I like James and the others, and I don't agree with everything Cassie does in this book, but I understand it. There are a lot of exhausted and stressed conversations/decision here, as well as a disconnect between people reaching for perfect vs good enough. Jake is exhausted. The phrasing throughout these books makes me think the whole series might take place in less than a year, two at the most. I don't remember if this is ever confirmed, but Rachel talks in terms of having fought battles for months, not years.

* A small dive into Seerowpedia reveals that they've been fighting for several years now.

Uglies is about self-esteem, self-hatred, and the pursuit of beauty through a dystopian lense, balancing showing & telling to keep from infodumping. This was my first dystopia as a kid, & I’m pleased that it holds up as well as I remember.‬

Tally is an unreliable narrator in a really good way. She doesn’t really lie to the reader, but her narration is so wholly shaped by her worldview that her thought process informs the reader about the world in a really neat way. She’s not infallible, so when her assumptions about her world are wrong it affects what she lets the reader know.

Most of what I love in this series is set up here but pays off later, so to keep it spoiler free: read this series, read this book. I do need to give the cw that there are serious discussions of body image and negative ideation related to bodies, so please take care of yourselves.