One day last December, while incredibly bored at work, I stirred up some drama in a discord server I’m in by admitting that I had no idea what a “warrior cat” was and, as that started to die down, that I’d never read any of the Animorphs books. Since most of us grew up in or after the 90s, I discovered that I was one of the few who had never been exposed to either sprawling franchise and, since I wanted something fun to do, I suggested we do a book club centered around reading all of the animorphs books in a single year. Someone drew up a schedule, another person shared a link to a freely available PDF of the books (which had been shared during the early days of the pandemic, when everyone desperately needed something to do and parents struggled to occupy their children), and I briefly tried to get everyone to figure out if we were going to do a proper full book club or just post our reactions to things. Since we landed on just posting reactions, as I was apparently the only person who explicitly said they wanted to discuss the books as we read them, I’ve felt a lot less motivated to keep up with this largely solo experience. Despite that, I’ve managed to mostly keep up with the schedule (we’re reading book 8 this week, after having read the first seven and then the first “Megamorphs” book) and I’ve had disappointingly few conversations about what we’ve read so far.

What is probably most impressive to me is the internal consistency of these short novels. I’m reading them all via PDF, so I have no idea what their page length is or even the size of the books in general (I have some hazy memories of what the books looked like on the shelf at one of the various libraries I went to during my childhood, but that’s only good for nightmarish recollections of the wild cover art). Regardless of their actual size, though, the way that some sixty-plus books were published in the span of four or five years is incredibly impressive. That is no small amount of effort and while there was probably some editing and a decent amount of writing and plotting done before the publication of the series began, its still impressive that each of the narratorial points-of-view has a very distinct flavor to it, enough that you can easily pick out which character is narrating the book you’re reading without reading the opening chapter where they tell you. While the repetitive nature of the opening chapter can be a little grating at times (which is probably only grating as I read at least one of these books per week), it does an excellent job of rehasing relevant events, giving a broad look at what has happened in the series so far, and setting up the premise of the series so that a new reader can be reasonably well-informed if they started reading in the middle of the series rather than at the start. An idea that would seem ridiculous to me except there’s no way I could have gotten my hands on all those books in the time frame of them coming out. I’d definitely have missed some and it wouldn’t have been a terrible experience if I’d skipped any but the most important books I’ve read so far (which is maybe 2 of them).

Taken as individual books, a lot of them are fairly humdrum. The premise is interesting, but the world feels incredibly ephemeral in a way that is frequently distracting. There’s an in-universe reason given (these are reports of events written by our heroes who have to avoid details that might allow them to be discovered or found out by the villains) but that feels like its trying to do too much work when all of the descriptions aside from the grotesque transformations tend to lean on the light side and the broader details are few and far between. Sure, these are books intended for middle schoolers so they need to be on the lighter side to catch the whole range of reader levels, but I think they could have stepped up the detail without alienating any of the kids. It’s not like they skimped on the emotional complexity, after all. The kids are traumatized pretty much immediately in the books and there’s usually at least one majorly traumatizing event every book or two. There’s a horrible death by ants thing, nightmares resulting from being a part of the food chain, a mother who supposedly died years ago and has actually been kidnapped by aliens… It honestly does a really good job of capturing the emotional complexity of being a child soldier in a secret war that no one can know about and does an even better job depicting the trauma responses that result from the various battles, narrow escapes, and horrible injuries their animal forms suffer that, thankfully, vanish when they transform back.

Honestly, this series is so much better crafted than I expected. It takes the emotional capabilities of its target audience seriously and doesn’t hold back. I’m only through eight books so far and it’ll be a while longer before I write more (I plan to do one post every couple months), but I’m fairly impressed with the technical skill and craft that went into these books. I’m sure some of that assesment is a result of the various subconscious biases I’ve picked up over the years, but I expected something that would be much more difficult for me to read. That said, they don’t flow perfectly since there’s still some things that take me out of the stories, like the complete and total absence of parents unless those parents are there to make their child’s life more difficult. Never once do the parents seem to notice the massive change in their children’s behavior as they become warriors trying to stave off an alien invasion. I mean, I have a pair of emotionally neglectful parents that claim to not have noticed all the trauma and abuse of my childhood, so I know its entirely possible, but it is just staggering how absolutely worthless every single adult is. It would beggar belief if I hadn’t had an incredibly similar experience as a child.

Still, I’m doing my best to stick to the schedule. It’s not like it takes more than an hour or two to read one of the books. I’m just struggling to stay focused on any one things these days and the willpower required to experience something new rather than fall back into old familiar media is a bit more than I can muster some days. Especially when I’ve got podcasts to listen to, video games to play, and a couple TV series to cycle through. None of these books are fascinating enough to really capture my attention, but they’re definitely a fine way to pass the time. I don’t think I’d recommend them, though, since you should probably just look up a decent plot summary if you feel curious about what happens in the series. The only reason I’d recommend them is if you want to read a huge pile of books this year. The Animorphs series is great for that.