Hey guys! How's it going? I'm doing pretty well. Earlier in the week I reviewed a movie that I've been wanting to review since I began blogging six years ago when I reviewed Jetsons: The Movie. Today I'm going to be reviewing a book that I've wanted to review since I started blogging six years ago. That book is the first book in the Animorphs series by K.A. Applegate, The Invasion. Because I have the 2020 printing of the 2011 re-release, I'm going to be talking about the changes that Scholastic made to this book. Believe it or not this isn't the only book series that Scholastic has done this with in the last eighteen years. But I'll talk about that more a little later on. Right now, let's get into the book.
The Invasion is probably the best opening to a long running series of novels I've ever read, if not of all time. Unlike The Tower Treasure, it introduces all of the major players, with the exception of Ax, but I'll talk about that when I review The Message, and unlike This Can't Be Happening at Macdonald Hall, this book is pretty much what the series would be as a whole, with some little changes as the series went along. Which is to be expected with any long running book series.
I was in grade six when I first read this book. I borrowed it from the school library in like January or February 1999. It also wasn't the first Animorphs book that I read either. The first one was book #23 The Pretender and I think I started watching the TV show before I read the books. So I was pretty late to the series and by the time I got around to it, they were already on book 34 or 35. And while I enjoyed The Pretender, I fell in love with the series with The Invasion. I think that's just because this is book 1 and so I was better able to become integrated with the series reading the first book than I was reading the 23rd book. Although to be honest I actually like The Pretender quite a bit more than I do The Invasion just because I don't like Jake as much as I like Tobias, and this is a Jake narrated book, whereas The Pretender is a Tobias narrated book.
The Animorphs themselves are a bit of a mixed bag for me. When I first read this book back in 1999 my favourite characters were Jake and Tobias because I wanted to be Jake and I was Tobias. I didn't like Marco, despite the tragic backstory of his mom being killed in an accident two years before this book opens, and his dad falling to pieces about it because people who joked like that were people I had difficulty dealing with at that age, as I thought they did it just to be mean. I also couldn't really relate to Marco's circumstances, especially since I didn't know anyone who was in that sort of situation. Rachel was a bit different, since I knew people whose parents were divorced.
As an adult, I can still relate to Tobias the most, though differently than I did when I was a kid. However, despite her lack of anything to do in this book, Rachel is my absolute favourite character. In these first few books, though she'll be slightly overshadowed by Ax after book 4, The Message. Again, I'll get there. The reason I like Rachel so much despite her lack of screen time is that when she is in the book, interacting with the other characters, she does so in a strong, assertive, and aggressive way. Which I enjoy in fictional characters, as well as in people in my real life. Especially in the 90s. Only three years earlier you had Kimberly and Trini on Mighty Morphin Power Rangers and while I like both of those characters, neither of them felt very assertive or strong. Inspiring, sure, but Kimberly was always getting kidnapped by Rita and Lord Zedd or screaming for Tommy to rescue her (just wait until I review "Green With Evil" and Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie because I got alot more to say about Kimberly in both of those reviews) and both Trini in season 1 and Aisha in seasons 2 and 3 did pretty much nothing the whole time they were on screen. But Rachel? Rachel will kill you with her pinky finger if you even try to suggest that she needs protection. She IS the protection.
Rachel is also the most loyal, unselfish, person in this entire book, aside from the Andalite, Prince Elfangor. Even when she was afraid when confronted with the possibility of dying if she decided to help her friends fight the Yeerks, she did it because her friends needed her and that was more important than her own fears and doubts. And she became angry when Marco kept trying to convince the kids to walk away from the call to action because she felt that he was being selfish when the world needed them to save it. But here's the thing, Marco isn't being selfish and it's not that he doesn't want to try to face the Earth. It's that Marco is looking out for the person who is closest to him. His father.
As I said, I really didn't like Marco much when I was a kid. But reading this book as an adult I completely understand where Marco's coming from when he says the kids shouldn't have to carry the weight of the world on their shoulders. His mom is dead, and because of this, Marco and his dad only have each other to lean on, and at this point in the series Marco's dad has fallen to pieces, doesn't have a great job, or doesn't go to work if he does have a job. So naturally, Marco wouldn't want to leave his dad alone if anything should happen to Marco during a mission. And that is perfectly understandable. It's just that Jake, Cassie, Rachel and Tobias don't worry about that as much as Marco does. Which actually brings me to Tobias.
Tobias is a character that I identified with when I was a kid because he was the loner/outcast kid and he wasn't loud and obnoxious like Marco was. However now, as an adult I can relate to him because when he got trapped in his hawk morph at the end of this book he disappeared from school and nobody, but his closest friends noticed. His closest friends, being Jake, Rachel, Marco, and Cassie (obviously). When I graduated from high school I left school before the semester was over because I had all of my credits needed to graduate, and I had all of the required community service hours as well. The only people at school who noticed were Brad, Amber and a girl named Julie. Which sucked in a way because I'd hoped I'd made more of an impact at OTHS than that. But by that point all of my other real friends had already graduated or had transferred away from OTHS, so I didn't have as many people at the school who actually cared about me enough to notice or care that I had suddenly disappeared from school before the semester was over. Though Tobias doesn't even have family who care enough about him to report him as missing.
People in the LGBTQ identify with Tobias because they see him as an allegory as it's been thought that Tobias was very unhappy in his own body, based on some of Jake's narrative and dialogue in this book, and got trapped as a hawk deliberately to escape his life. I see that as well, but I also see it as an allegory for anyone who has a terrible home life and will do anything to escape that life. In Tobias's case, he went over the two hour morph time limit and got trapped in hawk morph. Of course Tobias's life gets alot more complicated as the series goes on and his true parentage is revealed.
Despite him being the narrator and focus character for this book, I don't really have a whole lot to say about Jake. Even with his discovering that his older brother, Tom, was taken by the Yeerks and became a Controller, Jake's biggest dilemma in this book is how to tell Tom that he didn't make the junior high basketball team, Tom's old team. In fact it's really not until book 31, The Conspiracy, that Jake has an actual life changing dilemma to figure out. Whereas in book 7, The Stranger, Rachel has to decide to give up fighting the Yeerks and go live with her dad, or to stay in town with her mom and sisters and continue fighting the Yeerks as an Animorph. Not to mention she has to deal with the fact that her boyfriend is a hawk named Tobias and his lifespan is now shorter because hawks don't live as long as humans do. But I'll get into that another time. Which brings me to Cassie.
Cassie has never been a character that I've liked. Of all of the Animorphs, Cassie is the most hypocritical, well, okay, with the exception of Ax later on, but we'll get there. I get that Katherine and Michael wanted Cassie to be the peacemaker of the group, but in all of her scenes where she's refereeing an argument within the group, she just ends up being a people pleaser as a result. For example, in the opening of this book where Jake makes the mistake of asking Rachel and Cassie if they want the guys to walk home with them because they're girls, and Rachel starts to tell Jake off, Cassie just says, "I'd appreciate it if they did walk with us. I know you're not afraid of anything Rachel, but I guess I am." Cassie basically just said that to shut Rachel up and so that she could spend time with Jake.
It's even more of a problem in later books when the group is voting on pivotal courses of action in their war against the Yeerks and Cassie's blatant indecision or outright disgust with what they have to do to prevent the Yeerks from totally conquering Earth often hampers the group. It gets slightly better after book 19, The Departure, which is a Cassie-centric book that really does not paint her in a good light at all, but there are still pivotal moments that might've gone better if Cassie hadn't been so against fighting the Yeerks. I'm not saying that that is a bad character. My problem with Cassie is that they're inconsistent with what she opposes. There's a moment near the end of the series that perfectly highlights this inconsistency that I'll talk about when I get to that book.
My only problem with this book, the unnecessary changes made aside, is a problem that I actually have with this series as a whole. And that's the rotating first person POV used in every book. Marco and Ax's books are better at this than Rachel, Jake, Cassie, and Tobias's books are, but I find that in the Jake books, with a few exceptions, they could actually be Marco books because we get so much with Marco in them almost to the exclusion of the other characters. I get that Jake and Marco are best friends and at that age Jake would spend more time with Marco than he would Rachel or Cassie. But when you have an ensemble cast, especially a large one like this, using first person POV seems to be very restrictive as the point of view doesn't change and so not only are you not getting the perspectives of the other characters unless they're with the POV character, but you're also not getting much character development either. Unfortunately it doesn't get better when the Megamorphs books have chapters that alternate between all five Animorphs and Ax.
Before I give my final thoughts on this book, I just want to talk about the 2011 re-releases and the "updates" made to the first eight books of the series. In 2011 Scholastic began a re-release program for the Animorphs series, starting with the first two books, The Invasion and The Visitor. The idea was to modernize it and introduce the series to a new group of kids because it was pretty popular with kids my age in the mid 90s to early 2000s. Except their attempt to modernize the books were inconsistent and consisted of changing things like "Sega" to "console" when referring to Jake and Marco's gaming systems. As well as changes in technology used and updated, but still out of date cultural references. This book doesn't have as many of those changes as the next seven books do, but it's still something that Scholastic didn't need to do. The original fans hated the changes (obviously) and nobody under the age of 24 or 25 were interested. In other words, the kids that Scholastic were hoping to get interested, weren't. This isn't the only time that Scholastic has made these kinds of changes when re-publishing a book series.
In 2003 when Scholastic chose to re-release the Bruno & Boots series by Gordon Korman, they changed the name of the series to Macdonald Hall, changed several of the books's titles, and made the same sort of changes to the books that they made to Animorphs in 2011. Inconsistent with technology use, and cultural references.
Personally, I don't have a problem with the changes themselves. What I do have a problem with is how inconsistent they are. For example, if you're going to update certain references then actually update them and update them throughout the books. If you're going to leave them alone then leave ALL of them alone. Animorphs is supposed to be set in the 90s and 2000s. Therefore replacing decade specific with generic ones doesn't make sense. I'll get into this more with book 4, The Message when I review that in a few weeks.
Overall the story and characters hold up pretty well for a 25 year old book. What doesn't hold up are the changes made in 2011 just because they're so generic and take away from the fact that this series was published in the mid 90s to early 2000s, they're of that time, and shouldn't be messed with. Like if you want to re-release the series then that's fine, but don't change them needlessly like that. Having said that I still enjoyed this book. Not just because it's nostalgic, but because it's a good book and a great start to an awesome series of a kind that just doesn't get made nowadays.
Alright guys that's going to be it for me for today. I'll be back tomorrow with a review of the 2017 TV movie, Bruno & Boots: The Wizzle War, based on the 1982 novel, The War with Mr. Wizzle by Gordon Korman. It's on YTV tonight and I am really excited to watch it. So until then have a great evening and I will talk to you tomorrow. Take care.
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