The Unexpected (Animorphs #44)

I was actually really enjoying this one until we ran into Yami and his family and once again had front row seats to the animorphs writers' absolute disdain for Indigenous people and cultures. A grown man from /any/ culture is not picking metal off the ground and using it for carving without sterilizing it first, and a grown man living in the middle of nowhere sure as hell isn't injuring himself and just ignoring the basics of wound care. that's not even getting into the general infantilization of Indigenous beliefs.

Maybe If I wasn't reading these rapid-fire I wouldn't have noticed, but between this and the first megamorphs book there's a troubling trend here re: Indigineity.

Opening scene has the Animorphs involved in a shoot-out between a few Marines and a bunch of enemy Yeerk controllers at the airport, because a piece of wreckage from an alien fighter ship was found and who's going to have it. Cassie gets caught in the middle, nearly killed, escapes by morphing a fly and hiding in some luggage, winds up on a plane headed to Australia. The Yeerks attack and there's a crash and she's lost in the desert. She morphs again to escape safely, but is witnessed by an Aboriginal boy nearby. He's not at all surprised, because his traditional beliefs lead him to readily accept people having powers to change into animals. Really? This made me a bit uncomfortable. So. Cassie gets sheltered by the Aboriginal family, show more and makes a plan to get back home. The outstation radio was destroyed by Yeerks, so Cassie is going to travel as kangaroo overnight (too hot during the day, even as a native animal) to the nearest place where she can use a phone. But the boy's grandfather gets a leg injury that develops into a terrible infection alarmingly fast, and Cassie and the boy perform an amputation. Even for a sci-fi book in a series that really stretches reality, this was too much for me. There's other adults in the community, even one who is a healer- and it's two relatively inexperienced kids who perform an emergency operation? Um, no. Description of that was very unsettling, too.

At the end, Cassie has another confrontation with the enemy, who discovered her location and are going to wipe out all the innocent people there, unless she surrenders. She runs off in kangaroo form, hoping to lead them away. Finds a wild kangaroo mob and hides among them, the wild kangaroos and Cassie-kangaroo end up fighting Taxxons and Hork-bajir soldiers. A lot of this was just ridiculous scenarios.... I found the beginning escapade uninteresting (fight scenes bore me)- the story got far more interesting when Cassie landed in Australia, but then disappointing. I don't know very much about Aboriginal people, but the depiction of them in this book felt shallow. I did like reading about the kangaroos, their incredible stamina and defense abilities against predators.

The other good parts of this book were seeing Cassie on her own- having to quickly solve problems, escape the enemies, and finding it in her to actually kill a bunch of enemies when she had to. She was fairly resourceful once she figured out where she'd landed. And upon returning back home, there's some very nice moments between her and Jake, demonstrating how much they care for each other, how worried Jake was about her disappearance. The usual humor among the group when they're hanging out in the mall at the food court re-grouping now that Cassie's back with them.

from the Dogear Diary show less

The Unexpected Cassie ends up alone in Australia. She has to face the enemy. She acquires a Kangaroo morph. It is interesting how the Roos would lure their chasers to the water then turn on them and drown them.

A short comment for every book of the series until I get a chance to re-read them. All three of my sons and I loved this series and read every single book - I even bought every single book (most, but not all, used; some through school book sales). I'm excited to re-read them to see how the five main characters develop and to watch all the different transformations again.

this is a great book.

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