The Forgotten

Animorphs #11
by K.A. Applegate

Back to the Animorphs. I breezed through this one in just two sittings. The story moves at a very fast pace- I guess that makes it exciting for kids (the intended audience). I do wish for more details, but am still able to enjoy it. In this one, the Animorphs discover the enemy has a Bug Fighter in a burnt-out wrecked grocery store. They sneak in as flies (disgusted by the form but thrilled at its powers of flight) and steal the spacecraft. Zoom up out of the atmosphere- their Andalite friend Ax can drive it (seemed implausible, but whatever) and are intercepted by an enemy ship- when they fire on each other the beams cross causing a crash and a time-warp. The kids suddenly find themselves in the rain forest, while the enemy are also crashed nearby and searching for them. They morph into a tiger and bear to fight the enemy, but also acquire two new ones- monkey and jaguar. The monkey is easy (being so close to humans) and fun, but their un-monkeylike actions in a crisis attract the enemy's attention (who then start killing all the monkeys in sight). Also, they encounter some tribal natives, who see them morphing out of monkey form and assume them to be some kind of forest spirits. The rough conversation they had with the natives was awkwardly easy because one of the kids spoke some Spanish, and the native language was close to Portuguese- but wouldn't Ax have been able to understand it anyway? Oh well. They morph into jaguars- which is also familiar, at least to Jake, because he's been a tiger before. At first, being human, they found the rain forest oppressively hot and humid, crawling with frightful insects, dangerous snakes, and difficult to move through. As jaguars though, they saw its beauty and wild diversity- able to see in the dark, noticing more individual life forms than they'd ever seen. There's a terribly one-sided battle with the Visser when they get back to the crashed ship, but everything resolves suddenly- death is the passage back to their proper time- and it turns out only Jake can remember what happened (due to things I won't explain, not wanting to spoil all of the story). A bit disappointingly, it's one of those storylines where you get all invested in the drama, only to have the character wake up at the end, realizing it was all just a dream. Kind of.

Read this one on my kindle.

Rating: 2/5            176 pages, 1977

more opinions:
Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tales