"The fight for the planet continues in this gripping installment -- and the Animorphs must make an exacting choice.The last time Rachel and her friends entered the giant Yeerk pool beneath their town things went very bad. This time they plan to be careful, and sneak in as roaches, just to spy.
Once they're inside, though, the team gets caught. But right as things are looking their most dire, everything stops. Everything.
Then Rachel and the Animorphs hear a voice. It belongs to a very old, very powerful being, and it says it can save them. But if it does, the Earth will be defenseless."
The Stranger is the seventh Animorphs book, and as I've mentioned before, as a kid I was a little bit obsessed with this series. So when I saw a copy of this book (one of my favourites) for sale at a library clearance I picked it up for JJ's brother. It's actually an updated version of the book I read, re-released last year as part of an unsuccessful relaunch of the line.
The Stranger is Rachael centred and has a couple of plot threads. Kicking off with the discovery of a new entrance to the Yeerk Pool, and the Animorph's decision to infiltrate it with the intention of discovering the whereabouts of the Yeerk's Kandrona (the replica sun that they feed from). Whilst there they encounter the Ellimist (essentially an all powerful alien God) and get given the opportunity to decide the fate of humanity.
The B plot is Rachael being given an out; a chance to leave behind her life as an Animorph and relocate to a different state with her Dad.
The plot then is all about choices, Rachael is given the chance to end her involvement in the war by both her father and the Ellimist, and her personal struggle, as well as the decisions of the Animorphs as a whole are the main focus of the book.
It's a theme that comes up a lot in the books; more notably with Cassie and Ax who both face difficulties in justifying their role against their morality (Cassie) or duty (Ax). But for a series where the decision to fight and keep fighting despite all the horrors they have experienced was notably quick, it's nice to see the ramifications of these choices.
Rachael can sometimes be a very one note character in the books that don't focus on her, but she tends to be far more nuanced in her own stories. Between this and the David arc she shows far more compassion and fear than is normally the case, even going as far as to admit to it to the rest of the Animorphs.
The key thing here is that the heroes are given an explicit opportunity to choose their destiny. The heroes choice is a common trope in fiction, emphasising that these individuals knowingly give up on the things that would make them happy for the greater good (think Bruce Wayne sacrificing his reputation to maintain the Batman secret, or Spider-Mans 'with great power must also come great responsibility').
The Ellimist gives the series a chance to explore exactly what it means for these teens to be facing up to a potential lifetime of war, it's the first time they question what the future will look like should the war drag on and on.
The conversation between Rachael and Tobias represents an acceptance that their life can't be normal again;Rachael's decision to stay with the Animorphs and not leave foreshadows the fact that, (spoiler alert), she won't make it through this war. Her chance to get out rejected she will be in it to the end, and won't get to live beyond it. The tragedy is that here is the last point at which she could conceivably have escaped from the path laid out for her - rejecting the warrior she is becoming and returning to normality with her Dad.
By contrast the Ellimist presents a different choice; not a return to the status quo and abandoning the mission, but recognition that their cause it lost and choosing to save those they care about. Abandoning the war for Earth to save their families is a harder choice to make. Unusually, despite initial resistance they eventually make the decisions to do so. The fact that the Ellimist is playing a different game altogether is irrelevant: this is a book in which the heroes do come to the conclusion that abandoning earth to an almost certainly inevitable conquest by the Yeerk's is the best option. It says something about the stakes of the series that this decision is presented as almost certainly the best one; saving a few families and the species from extinction is better than allowing the entire population to succumb to enslavement.
It absolutely blew my mind as a kid that just a few books into such an epic mega-series the heroes are so shell-shocked and traumatised that giving up and letting the bad guys win to save a few dozen people is not only considered a valid option, but actually gets chosen as the strategy.
There are some parts where it's clear that this is one of the earlier books, and the rules haven't quite been solidified yet; during the escape from the Yeerk Pool the Animorphs demorph to human to avoid being eaten by a Taxxon, something which is unlikely to happen in later books where the paranoia about being discovered to be humans has really crept in. Rachael complaining that a controller pushed her over is especially disconcerting; it would be hard for anyone to mistake a human girl for an andalite, so if he's knocking her over you would assume he had realised that the guerrilla force the Yeerk's were hunting wasn't just comprised of blue alien centaurs with deadly blade tails. Clearly observational sloll isn't something that Visser 3 prizes.
We do get some great action sequences in the book that made it stand out for me when younger though; the inevitably future scene of Yeerk victory with dead bodies in schools and burnt out cars was one of my first post-apocalyptic scenes. Hands down the highlight however has to be Marco punching a security guard in the face through a reinforced window whilst in gorilla morph. It's up there with his driving the truck as a gorilla (in Megamorphs 1?) as a highlight for the character.
This is a pretty important book in the series introducing the Ellimist, Rachael's Grizzly morph and fleshing out the character so often written off as a gung-ho blood knight. More tha that though it's one of the most entertaining, and features some great moments and character development for almost everyone.
Also Try;
K A Applegate, Animorphs - http://animorphsforum.com/ebooks/
Michael Grant, Gone
R L Stine, Goosebumps
Kate Thompson, Switchers Trilogy
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