The Resistance

Animorphs #47 

by K.A. Applegate 

 

    Two plotlines in this one. The valley of free Hork-bajir is discovered by the enemy, and the Animorphs scramble to deal with that. They want to relocate the colony but the Hork-bajir refuse, insist on standing their ground and fighting even though they are hugely outnumbered. Marco's parents are oddly uninvolved in the planning- I got the impression they were just standing around in the background looking stoic. They never said anything! Anyway, at least there's a new interesting morph in this book- beaver. Part of the plan is to expand a beaver dam they found upstream, so it will hold back enough water that when they break the dam it will flood the valley and wipe out the enemy. Although the amount of time they had between completing the dam work and releasing the flood, didn't seem enough to me, to build up the volume of water they needed. I don't know. 

Another key point in this story is that Tobias discovers a bunch of campers nearby, who are right in the enemy's path. Jake and Tobias approach the campers and advise them to leave because there's bad weather coming. The campers don't buy it. They think the Animorphs just want to steal their campsite! So Jake suddenly decides to just morph in front of them, and tell them that aliens are invading. Happens that these campers are huge Star Trek fans, instantly thrilled at the idea of an alien invasion, and eager to play along (turns out in the end, at least one of them thought it was an elaborate LARP). Most of the campers go back to the valley with them to join the fight. Unfortunately, the battle is very real and one of the newcomers gets killed.

Parallel storyline, which I don't really get: at the start of the book, Jake's mom makes him clean up a room in the basement. He finds a box with a uniform and journal from an ancestor who fought in the Civil War. Not clear how much Jake reads of the journal, but the alternating chapters relate this young lieutenant's experiences from the past. It has a lot of obvious similarities to the Animorphs storyline- young leader, small group fighting off the enemy in a rather desperate situation, more people come in to join the fight who are inexperience- in this case it was freed slaves, and a lot of the Union soldiers and townspeople did not welcome their presence. But I didn't see what the point was? I kept thinking there'd be a time-travel thing happen, or that Jake would learn something from the journal to use in the Hork-bajir fight. Nope. Also there's a particular scene in the Civil War storyline that I swear I've seen exactly the same in a movie. 

Rating: 3/5                      160 pages, 2000 

more opinions: 

Thistle-Chaser 

Arkham Reviews 

the Library Ladies 

Animorphology