He had never known who his father was, and his mother had simply decided, a couple years ago, to abandon him.
(book 1, Jake, about Tobias)
Wait… “a couple years ago”???
I could be remembering parts of the later series wrong, but… that does not match what I remember. I seem to recall that Tobias basically didn’t know his mother. Loren had some kind of terrible accident, lost her sight, lost her memory, lost her ability to take care of herself… and somehow, while going through the long process of re-learning how to brush her teeth and feed herself, lost contact with her family as well. And… none of them reached out to her, I guess?? From what I remember, she hadn’t exactly been trying to find Tobias, because she couldn’t remember him and could barely take care of herself, and was an isolated disabled person being crushed by capitalism, but also she had no idea where he was, or where he had been, or that he was missing, or anything like that. Her family just… dropped her. And then told her kid she’d been the one to abandon him.
In any case, that was when Tobias was very young, not a couple of years ago!
Of course, the easiest explanation is that this is just a minor continuity error. Animorphs has several, and with a 54+ book series, with a new book coming out every month, it’s amazing there aren’t more continuity errors. But that’s a boring explanation; once you start using it, you kind of take all the fun out of noticing the details. With few exceptions, I like to play by “All Cannon is Canon” rules.
So, in the game of All Canon Is Canon, I guess we can assume that Jake, who is narrating this book, is simply incorrect! He thinks Tobias’ mom only left a few years ago. It makes sense he’d have some details wrong; Tobias probably never sat him down and laid all his tragic facts out.
As a whole, in context, this translates to “to abandon him”. But it seems to be pretty context-dependent! A more literal translation is something like “him in Stich to let”, with Stich being a bit of a mystery word. I was using a couple online translators to figure this sentence out, and depending on what I put in I got “Stich zu lassen” -> “to let down”, “ihn im Stich” -> “let him down”, “Stich zu lassen” -> “to leave stitch”, and “Stich” give me any of these: engraving, stitch, sting, stab, trick, prick, pang, thrust, stab wound, piercing pain…
“abandon” isn’t anywhere on there. Neither is “down”, while we’re at it.
It could just be that my online dictionary is wrong, and should include “abandon” in its list of translations. But my guess is it’s another German expression - something like how in English you can “leave someone in a bind”.
