In Which Adam & Ifi Continue to Review Animorphs

http://adamdreifus.blogspot.com/2011/08/in-which-adam-ifi-review-animorphs-book.htmlNow, I am sure that you all remember that review that Ifi and I did of the first Animorphs book. I sure did. Now, we had a lot of fun doing this, and there are a lot of Animorphs books to review, so we put up a separate blog just for that! So without further due, I present:

Cinnamon Bunzuh! Here, we'll be reviewing a new Animorphs book every week. All 64, until we're done. I'll continue with regular updates on here, so don't worry about that.

And to show you I mean business, here is my entire Animorphs collection for you all to see:

I'm just missing 3 books. It will haunt me forever.

And yes, I am a crazy person.

In Which Adam & Ifi Review Animorphs: Book 1, The Invasion

Well, this is something new that I shall be trying out. My friend Ifi, of When I Grow Up and I shall be reviewing the Animorphs book series from start to finish over the next period of time. (I'll still be doing regular blog updates as well, and we are still experimenting with the format of the new reviews, so we shall see how it goes. For Ifi's version of the review, go here.

Anyways, a backstory will likely be good here. Animorphs is a longrunning series of young adult novels written by K.A. Applegate. over the course of 1996 to 2001. To give a basic description of the premise, five teenagers stumble upon a crashed alien spacecraft. The dying alien they find inside tells them of the Yeerks, a parasitic alien race that have been steadily infiltrating human society in order to take them over. The dying alien grants them the power to acquire and transform into any animal, so they might defend themselves, and hopefully hold the invasion force back, at least for a while.

Despite the young target audience of these books, they were astonishingly dark at times, heavy on gore, and not shying away from showing the psychological impact that being engaged in a war would have on someone of that age. Over time, Applegate would vastly expand the animorphs-verse with a variety of alien species and planets, some of varying degrees of realism, which in spite of how many of these books were ghostwritten (with 12-14 books a year, to 64 books in total, it would be impossible to do otherwise) this lead to a deeply engaging story, that pretty much singlehandedly got me into reading as a small child.

And yes, that's the thing. I began this series as a kindergardener, before I could even read well at all, and kept going for years until the series was finished. And this, more or less is why I love this series so much. It was through these books that I basically taught myself to read, and therefor gained an interest in books to begin with. And without that, I would not be interested in writing children's books of my own. But enough about this.

So without further ado, I present you with Animorphs Book 1: The Invasion.