Well, we're in the home stretch now, for me, sort of. This was the second-to-last Animorphs book I read when they first came out (or, technically, ever), but it's the last one that made a major impression on me. I remember the team Fantastically Voyaging (or Magically School Bussing) in the next one, but nothing about the story beyond that. I retained many details of this one, which is more than I can say about Megamorphs 4, where only the last line rang the hint of a bell, or the Buffalo book, which I seriously thought came later because I didn't remember a jot of it when people talked about The Implications.
Anyway, it all adds up, I started reading Animorphs when it was brand new, and I was in the third grade. Three and a half years later, I was in Middle School, I'd been reading proper full-length novels for years, and I think the series started to feel a little wheel-spinny. More and more outrageous events were happening without feeling like it was actually altering the setting in the way it should (the kids went to space like three times! Two separate groups of Andalites turned up on Earth back-to-back and were not game-changers!). The whole thing had been increasingly episodic (derogatory). Plus, with the ever-increasing amount of books and my broadening tastes, I didn't re-read the later novels as compulsively as the earlier ones (only one Animorphs coming out a month when I needed by temperament and school policy to always be reading something meant I got to know the earlier books a lot better than the ones that came after there were thirty-plus). I wasn't aware of the whole ghost-writing thing, but the variations in quality couldn't have helped. I don't think it was an overt "I'm done with this" decision, and I'm trying to reach back to reconstruct my quarter-century-old adolescent opinions, but the bottom line is that I just sort of lost faith that the story was going anywhere and stopped reading. I can see a lot of things in this one that would've annoyed me. The in media res opening a climactic battle after a pointless mission that they barely give context to (because if it was an important mission, it'd be the subject of a book) is a trope that's wearing out its welcome. The wacky shifting sands of the future annoyed me, as did the fact that Jake never thinks about the fact that he'd already been to a Yeerk-dominated future-Earth and could compare or contrast what he's seeing now. Not finding out what Jake's big decision was, and the revelation that it was just a cosmic test by another random godlike cosmic being (a very "Gene Roddenberry is on deadline" move) was extremely frustrating, and as an adult, I can see that I would've gotten the vibe that the reason we don't find out what Jake did is that the author themself didn't know, they'd just piled up wacky future-stuff, didn't really care how it hanged together (Rachel's dead! No, wait, Rachel's actually alive, it's Jake who's been dead the whole time, but no one thinks it's weird he's here now and has an apartment and a job. Tobias is an elderly hawk, no, Tobias is a strapping Andalite in his prime! It's barely even dream-logic). Indeed, a lot of the ghostwriting-era books have been lacking in denouements, the story just resolves and abruptly stops with no chance to see what the characters made of the whole situation, or how they were changed by it.
So, two weeks from now is my first new Animorphs story in twenty-six years. And, I've heard the stories, I know what's waiting for me a week after that. Fun.
