Marco is stressed out of his mind and it's affecting his morphs. His entire life is nightmare fuel and the nightmares are getting worse. This mission was interesting, simultaneously ridiculous in execution but very high-stakes.

Books like this one make me wonder about morphing technology. It's too bad that they (so far) can't be stressed-out in a controlled manner to create useful chimeras, but I suppose being very controlled can also produce this, like Cassie's mid-air morph in The Prophecy.

The Animorphs and the free Hork-Bajir fight to protect the valley. The narration alternates between Jake and the journal of his great-uncle in the Civil War. The parallels are a bit too on the nose, but overall the narrative works. ‬

This one is okay, but it’s not my favorite. It’s important to set up what’s to come, but it wasn’t as memorable for me, despite the changes in the status quo which it brings.

Marco has an opportunity to eliminate Vissers One and Three, but only if he can hold it together and keep the bright line. We see his inclination towards ruthlessness, but also the stark reality that he's just a kid with an impossible choice.

Marco's self-assessment is both honest and aspirational. He is right that he sees the "bright line" from A to B, but he holds on to the idea that it will stay that simple when the life of someone he loves is on the line. It's simultaneous a mature and honest assessment of his capabilities, and a hopelessly naive belief that starting down this path won't in itself make it harder to finish.

I don't mean to be cryptic, but this one is incredibly interesting, terribly sad... and full of spoilers for Marco's entire arc so far.

Ax is pulled between Andalites and humans. Cassie confesses to her actions from The Ultimate, starting to repair the rift with Jake. The Animorphs experience one of their greatest victories, but at a high cost.

Ax is horrified by Cassie's actions and by the other Animorphs' responses to her. He puts himself on the line in their biggest mission yet, partly to try and resolve his internal conflict.

I'm glad to see that the new Animorphs are working well so far, it's an addition that makes sense at this point and is being handled well in the story. They could have been sidepieces but are portrayed as having important roles in ongoing missions.

Ax is an interesting point of view character, he spends what feels like too much time being continually surprised that humans are complex and contradictory, but that's really hard to balance. It's not badly done, but it feels like three books from the end is pretty late to finally side with them once and for all.

Cassie has to brave a dangerous rescue mission alone as the rest of the Animorphs are incapacitated by an illness that follows them across morphs. There's a lot of loneliness and fear as Cassie has less help when they all get sick.

This builds on the Yeerk peace movement first discussed in The Departure, and continues Cassie’s interactions with Aftran in a very important way. There’s a lot of tension in this story, as Cassie slowly takes on the roles normally held by her fellow Animorphs when Ax’s illness spreads. It seems like her way of trying to cope, like if she says what they would have said then somehow everything will be okay. I really like Erek’s calming presence, not taking over but assisting Cassie however he can. This is at least the second book in short succession that has the Animorphs needing to race a ticking clock (most recently was The Exposed).

The Hazel Wood is fascinating and creepy, filling slowly up with twisted words and scripted worlds as Alice runs towards answers and away from sense. Blood and death are companions here, sentinels and guides, for growing up is hard to do.

Alice's friendship with Finch felt real and grounded in a way that could have been discordant with the books slow slide into the surreal and magical, but instead served as a guidepost for a while. Having Finch know more about the stories in the book without having him just tell them to her made him feel more like a full person instead of a sidekick, since he not only had knowledge she didn't, but that knowledge wasn't merely deposited with her in order to move the story along. Once I realized he wasn't about to just recite the whole book of Althea's stories, I stopped waiting for it and was able to just let the story ride. The way the book plays with Alice's memory is really well done, it lends some of the fuzzy quality that older memories can have, while not making Alice feel like an unreliable narrator.

This book reminds me (in a good way) of "Tithe" by Holly Black. Both in terms of key revelations and in terms of the raw feel of its vision of the world. I anticipated the reveal, a little, but it still felt meaningful when it actually occurred.

I loved this book and I intend to keep up with the series. I definitely will stay away from reading any more of this series alone or at night, since it was creeping me out more and more the one evening I tried that. This is frequently gruesome, usually in a very sudden manner. It completely fits the tone of the book, building this dark and surreal feeling layered onto the normal world even before we get to the Hazel Wood itself, but it achieves some of that tone by having violence that is sudden and short, so that the terror lies in processing the aftermath, not in some drawn out description of the act itself.

Binti is about restitution and amends, bravery and voyage, halting a cycle of violence and miscommunication...in space. The tech is described with the surety and shorthand of familiarity to say you don't need more, for Binti knows what she's doing.

The pacing was strange and dreamlike. I don't normally read novellas and this one felt far too short of an exploration for such a rich world as was hinted at in the text. Luckily for my satisfaction there are sequels which I will be exploring, as I have been intrigued and want to linger longer here. There is just enough explanation of technology as to be satisfying without being hard sci-fi. I'll have to see how the later books handle it before I can say whether this is due to the brevity of the text or if it's a stylistic choice that will persist in the series. Overall I liked it and will be fine with either in the sequels.

I appreciated how it doesn't slow down for my lack of understanding, while also conveying some of the feel of the emotional burden in being alone in a crowd and constantly code-switching to explain one's self to others.

I shouldn’t leave this without mentioning that it has a lot of trauma in close succession with very little after-care, neither for the characters nor the reader. Since it’s very short and it has sequels I’ll be looking there for what this book is missing, and I’m reserving judgement until I see how it all plays out.

Binti: Home deals with anger, grief, and confusion, heading towards catharsis but still feeling tense for much of the book. Binti intends to take one journey but finds herself on another. It feels on edge, waiting for something to happen.

This book is full of grief and anger, and it feels more like part two of one long book rather than a second book in a series. It can be partially understood separately from Binti, but Binti needs this sequel in order to feel complete. This has the processing and the aftercare that Binti sorely needed, and ends with a taste of the action yet to come in the third book ([b:The Night Masquerade|34386617|The Night Masquerade (Binti, #3)|Nnedi Okorafor|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1495725402l/34386617._SY75_.jpg|55477512], which I will read next).

This deals with several kinds of cultural prejudices, including a book-specific form of colorism, as well as xenophobia both with literal aliens and with various groups of humans. 

It's hard to describe well because after finishing it I mostly feel tense. Even though a lot of things were processed and there was a very specific moment of catharsis, it was aftercare for one tragedy while re-contextualizing a lot of Binti's past in order to illuminate ongoing tensions and break the illusion that her existence before her travels was calm. Her journey had previously been framed in terms of running towards something, and now it appears that she also had some things to run from, whether she originally understood it that way or not.

On to book three...

Binti: The Night Masquerade is a fitting end to the Binti trilogy by [a:Nnedi Okorafor|588356|Nnedi Okorafor|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1507148868p2/588356.jpg]. The combination of action-packed climax with a lot of cool-down and aftercare makes the trilogy, and this stage of Binti's journey, feel complete in a way I wasn't expecting, but I appreciate.

The pacing is strange to me. I like how it concluded, but I was startled by spending almost half the book on what felt like falling action and conclusion, with the dramatic high-point nearly dead center. This, for me, cements my feeling that these shouldn’t be read as three separate books, but read together in short succession as one large story. When taken that way, the proportions feel better for every part of the story. After so much trauma, it felt good to have so much aftercare and literal healing be giving a large section.

Overall, I liked this book in particular and the trilogy in general. Though, I kept feeling off-kilter because I haven’t read a story that felt like this before, and I think that’s a good thing for me as a reader, especially when it was done so well.

The therapist’s perspective was relayed so directly in the end that it was a little jarring, but I think it makes sense when part of Binti’s problems were that so much that was important was unsaid, and she had a lot to process. It works, but I definitely didn't expect the tone, nor the brevity of that interaction right at the end.

It’s far from my favorite series, but I would recommend it.

The Last Olympian ends this series well while opening up the possibility (now fulfilled) of more works in this universe. The twists feel clever and appropriate to the earlier books, the battles are gripping, and I'm not ready for it to be over. 

This book accomplishes a very tricky thing (and, frankly, does it quite well): It has to cap off a series which is literally the stuff of gods, have stakes to match, pull off an appropriate resolution, and successfully make the pivot to explain the state of the world after the battle when the prophecy is fulfilled while still leaving room for more books in this universe. Speaking of the prophecy, that is handled well: It feel appropriately tricky in the pattern of mythic prophecies, the resolution defies expectations without feeling cheap, and there's enough groundwork laid in this book to match up the final resolution with the expectation laid by the earlier books. Without spoiling anything, I like how it was handled, and it worked out better than if it had been as was expected based on assumptions made early in the series. This assessment applies to one big thing and several smaller plot points. Tldr: having the twists made it more powerful instead of feeling cheap.

I wasn't expecting to be blown away by this series, but this final book feels better than how it started. I was worried that the casual affect and quippy nature of the main character, Percy, would be grating after a while, but around book three I stopped worrying about it and just enjoyed the story. 

I like this book, I would recommend the whole series, and I'll definitely put the other books in this universe in my queue to get to someday. I want to spend more time in this world, and I wish I'd done so sooner.