The Extreme

Animorphs #25
by K.A. Applegate

In this episode, the Animorphs- as you can guess by the cover- acquire a new morph, polar bear. But not until the very end of the story. This one had a fairly straightforward plot: they find out the enemy is building a structure in the Arctic that could populate the world with Yeerk pools (don't ask how) so they travel undercover there to stop it. Only they don't have any animal morphs that can deal with the cold, and aren't prepared to withstand it as humans, either. So a lot of the book is them desperately trying to survive the cold (morphed as wolves most of the time) while also trying to escape a new alien used by the enemy. At the very end they manage to acquire the polar bear, and then it's easy to live in the cold, they bash up the station, trick the aliens into disintegrating themselves (too easily) and run off. The part where they get the polar bear confused me, though. Rachel as a grizzly and Marco as a gorilla pinned a wild polar bear down while the others touched it to acquire its DNA, but there was no mention how they switched so that Rachel and Marco could also (they would have to be human to do so) I was actually waiting for that, see how they worked it out- but then they just, didn't. Someone suggested elsewhere the bear was calm enough in the acquiring state they could de-morph and touch it themselves, but it was never explained this way in the text. Hm. I also had a reading hitch when the animorphs as seals were making clicking noises to echolocate underwater- until I looked it up afterwards. Well, who knew. A lot of what made this story flow was just the characterization, banter between them, Ax involved in jokes about time, some hints at growing romantic feelings between Tobias and Rachel, Cassie and Jake. There was a bit of that in the last book, too- I forgot to mention it.

Rating: 3/5             146 pages, 1999

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