The Familiar (Animorphs #41)

It's hard to know what to make of this one. After a terrible battle, Jake wakes up as himself- but in the future. He's a grown man, and seemingly the only human not taken over by Yeerks. The world has become a very strange and terrifying place. Jake quickly has to figure out what's going on, what his place is, to avoid getting killed. He immediately attracts attention and suspicion though, because he doesn't know how to act, where to report for work, etc. Unlike the last book, he's fully aware that he's an Animorph, but can't manage to morph at first. Things are chaotic, he has strange visions or hallucinations (in some of them, horrifyingly seeing the injured and rotting bodies of people he killed during past battles come to life), and show more desperately tries to find what happened to his fellow Animorphs. It's not good. Seems they're all taken over by the aliens or dead. He finally locates Cassie, she's part of the last shred of resistance, working as a bitter, jaded terrorist. Of course there's a final terrible confrontation when Jake has the opportunity to stop the enemy from doing something that will make their control of Earth absolute, but it's at the costs of loosing Cassie. In the last scene, he's right there and can either save Cassie or push the abort button- but the chapter ends! There's a voice (and it's not the Ellimist so what the heck is going on) making some kind of assessment of how Jake did, and then he wakes up back in his own time, as a kid again. I gather that the point was to show how awful the future would be if the Animorphs fail, and to put Jake to a test- would he take the last chance to keep the planet from total alien domination, or save one person he loves. Only it doesn't show what he chose! Why? So frustrating. But it did have me blasting through the pages, intent to figure out alongside Jake what was going on in this chaotic mess of the future.

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I don't care that this is a childrens series that works within the tropes of the day, why on gods green earth would you follow a time-shenanegan book with another one? It wears thin really quickly and gives a pretty solid impression that we're running out of ideas for framing devices before we reach the climax. that's not even getting into the choice to combine it with the good old /it was all a dream/ trope, which is easily the weakest trope known to man. not a great look, not a great book. also, i know it was the early 2000s, but if someone describes a wheelchair user like that, they deserve to get folded.

Even more horrifying than the previous, Back to Before. It also seemed messy to me, not to mention inconsequential to the arc (except maybe to give Jake's morale more motivation).

I didn't like this one very much. What was the point of this book? Was it a dream, the Ellimist, or what? Hopefully later in the series it will be explained.

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.

what the fuck happened