Retromorphs: Animorphs Megamorphs #1: The Andalite's Gift

                           

We are now seven books deep into Animorphs. And you'd think that our next book would be #8: The Alien, Ax's first full book as narrator. But you'd be wrong. You see, now it's time to cover a staple of the Animorphs series, the special editions. Akin to other Scholastic works like Goosebumps and Babysitters Club, Animorphs got its own series of special edition books that are longer in length than a basic Animorphs book (well over 200 pages as compared to the 150-170ish of the main line). Eight books released in total throughout the series run. And no, I'm not taking into account the two Alternamorphs books, which were poor attempts at aping the Give Yourself Goosebumps books.

The ones I refer to are the Megamorphs and the Chronicles series. The Chronicles books serve as lore books, looking back at the history of certain characters. Meanwhile the Megamorphs books are more deluxe stories that don't really play any major role in the series canon. Something that's more of a pain in the ass when we get to the second Megamorphs. But they do one thing that other books don't, and that's split the narration between every character and not just focus on one like the main line books. And with that all out of the way, we can finally look at the first of these books released in between #7 and #8. It's The Andalite's Gift.

So interesting note about this book (and the first Chronicles book, but we'll get to that when its time) is that this book was actually released in two parts initially to get the story released quicker. Then shortly after, the full story was compiled into one big edition. Although it's more common to find the full book in the wild than it is the split editions.

Opening preamble, which I guess is more fine here since this is more of a special edition intended to entice new readers. Each first chapter for each character gets the standard introduction to who they are and their plight. Jake's situation, Rachel's,  Tobias'. Not really Cassie as her first chapter is chapter nine, but most of the characters do. Not as annoying as it could be, I guess. The Animorphs are at Cassie's barn having to deal with Rachel who needs to leave for a gymnastics camp that weekend. Meanwhile, Tobias is being really racist to an injured crow. Dude's really becoming a bird bigot in no time flat. However, they're far more fine with Rachel leaving for the weekend than they were with... you know... the rapist thing. They all figure that, heck with it, for one weekend we can just live like normal kids and try to get the whole Yeerk stuff out of our system. But, the kids still seem a bit shaken over all the events they've gone through since getting these new morphing powers, but they're also starting to get thicker skin.

The next day, Rachel heads to school early to wait for the bus to the gymnastics camp, but decides that she should kill time by going for a fly as a bald eagle. She morphs eagle and has a good soar on her way to visit Tobias. She also sees Ax and is about to greet him when suddenly baby birds fly out of a tree and start attacking her. In her haste to avoid contact, she crashes into a tree head-first. She starts to demorph when she crashes to the ground below and blacks out. Which means... Yup. This book has an amnesia subplot.

Congratulations?

So, while Rachel is unconscious with a legit concussion, we turn our attention to Marco, who is pissed that he's the only one not invited to a pool party from a girl at school named Darlene. He thinks it must be because she likes him (because Marco is a ladies man with charm that only he could love), but it's really because he dropped a Baby Ruth bar in the pool when he was ten and that was enough for a permanent ban. But that won't deter him as he plans to morph mouse alongside Ax and spy. Tobias shows up with a live mouse and sets off the old irony alarm as he comments on seeing an eagle take a header into a tree earlier. Marco and Ax morph mouse and it doesn't go well. They get spotted quickly and decide to just chase Darlene and everyone around instead. Jake and Cassie immediately catch on, and try to stall as Marco and Ax enter the basement and demorph.

While all the fracas is going down, the sky grows dark as a weird dust cloud looms and attacks with such force that it destroys the house and everything around it. Marco and Ax, still in the basement and now demorphed (and Ax in human morph) see the form of the dust cloud, which now looks like a tornado. A tornado with hundreds of eyes and whirling blades looking at them. So yeah, the main plot of the book is the animorphs vs a sentient alien tornado. Congratulations?

Rachel wakes up and sees that she's still partially in bird morph. She starts to panic, but calms down, trying to get herself to return to human form. Problem is, she can't remember who she is. She eventually manages to morph back to normal, but that's when she sees the alien tornado, which starts to chase her as she runs through the streets. It does some damage, including tearing right through a Ben and Jerry's truck, before eventually dissipating. The other Animorphs watch the news report later on the tornado. In the report, they see a blonde teenager in a skintight leotard wandering around. It quickly starts to dawn on them that A. this alien cloud is after the Animorphs and B. Rachel isn't at the gymnastics camp.

Rachel, still in a daze, continues to wander the forest until she runs into an old shack filled with clothes. She tries to take a yellow top, but gets caught by a strange old woman who has clearly been mentally broken. Rachel asks for a pair of shoes, and the woman leads her to a trapdoor in the shack leading to the basement. Then the woman attacks Rachel and shoves her down into the basement screaming about yeerks. This woman clearly was a former controller who lost her mental faculties after managing to free herself and kill her yeerk. But Rachel, still an amnesiac, doesn't understand what the hell she's going on about. Meanwhile, Jake, Marco and Tobias head to the scene of the destruction and Jake and Marco morph wolf to try and get some of Rachel's scent. Not long after morphing though, the alien cloud returns. Jake and Marco run into the woods, hoping that the trees will start to slow the cloud. Then, suddenly it veers to somewhere that's on fire.

Rachel's memories begin to reappear, but she still can't figure what they are. Suddenly, she smells smoke. The shack is on fire. Presumably the old lady tried to burn Rachel alive inside the shack. In her panic, she morphs grizzly and escapes, but the giant alien cloud reappears. In the midst of that, Rachel hears ax's voice through thought speak, but is still confused. She tries to fight the alien cloud, but its teeth rips apart her front paws. As Rachel gets enveloped by the beast, Ax morphs harrier to follow it, but the cloud then attacks him instead. Ax catches on quickly that this creature is focused on morphs and tries to destroy whatever changes form. He morphs back, but is still enveloped in the cloud which begins to leave. He also learns who is this cloud's master. Jake, Marco and Tobias show up to the burning shack, but no sign of Rachel or Ax. They haven't fully caught on, but they assume this must have something to do with the Yeerks.

So, what's Cassie been up to while all this went down? She went to all of Rachel's regular spots in hopes of finding her, but had no luck. But she did luck out on finding Chapman at the mall book store. If this does involve the yeerks, he'll be the best answer. She sneaks into a storeroom in the book store and morphs fly. She latches to Chapman and follows along. Back to Ax who is still in the clutches of the cloud, who brings him to the Blade Ship, which means it's time for some Visser Three. The cloud drops Ax in front of Visser Three and a group of armed Hork-Bajir. After smugly gloating over capturing one of the "andalite bandits", Visser Three introduces Ax to the cloud, which he calls a Veleek (a term given to a yeerk pet). The creature itself is from Saturn and usually just eats anything in sight. However, they managed to reprogram it to detect morphing energy and to capture the bandits for them. After explaining his evil plan, Visser Three has Ax thrown in jail.

Cassie, in fly morph, latches on to Chapman who is angry at a pair of cop controllers for not doing a good job in hiding their dirty work. But he does name drop the Veleek and its morph hunting abilities, which gives the other Animorphs some answers. At her barn later, they realize how the Veleek works. it attacks while the morpher is morphing, and has less of an interest when they aren't in morph. It also can't be two places at once, which is why it didn't attack Cassie at the mall. Ultimately, the four remaining Animorphs decide that they need to find a way to kick this cloud's ass. Meanwhile, Rachel, bear body a bleeding husk, manages to make it to the closest stream and demorph. Her memory slowly returning as she remembers the construction site and her own name. She follows the stream until she makes it to civilization. A suburban development, but it'll do. She sneaks into an abandoned house and passes out. She sees some visions and the word Animorph returns to her. But before she can figure that out, she hears an officer outside yelling at her to leave. And Rachel being Rachel (an amnesiac Rachel, but still) begins to morph elephant.

And of course, as she morphs, it attracts the Veleek, who starts heading in her direction as the other Animorphs spot it. And their only way to catch up to it without morphing is to, of course, steal the pickup truck belonging to Cassie's parents... despite these kids still not knowing how to drive. The Veleek catches Rachel, now in full elephant morph and tries to lift her up, but even it has a weight limit. Marco, Jake and Cassie drive to the scene as Jake starts slowly morphing tiger to turn the creature's attention to him. Meanwhile, Cassie jumps out of the truck and goes to Rachel, who still has memory loss, but is slowly getting it back. Marco makes it to the forest where Jake, now in full tiger morph tries to distract the Veleek. Their plan is for the Animorphs to morph back and forth in an effort to wear it out. However, the Veleek tears apart a tree Jake is on, causing him to fall to the ground below.

Visser Three has a captive Ax watch on from the blade ship, but gets upset when he sees the Veleek moving away from capturing Jake. It's already on Marco's tail as he is morphing gorilla and driving off. Vissed off as always, Visser Three sends for the bug fighters. As Cassie catches Rachel up to speed, she starts morphing squirrel in hopes to continue luring the beast. However, in he midst of everything, the bug fighters arrive and shoot dracon beams. Rachel crashes into the pickup truck, injuring gorilla Marco and laying herself out. The Veleek catches Marco while Rachel and Cassie demorph. Rachel's memories have fully snapped back, and the two morph Owl and try to escape oncoming Hork-Bajir. In the midst of that, they catch up to Jake.

While this is going on, Ax spots a flea on him and acquires it. He uses the morph long enough to create a ruse that he's vanished, then finally escapes. Marco, still in gorilla morph, is brought to the blade ship and placed in front of Visser Three. He won't speak to the Visser in hopes it won't tip him off that these fellow andalite bandits aren't andalites. While that happens, Ax latches to Visser Three and starts to demorph, which catches the attention of the Veleek, which attacks Visser Three and some Hork-Bajir. Marco uses a computer terminal to open the ship hatch, while Ax sees the millions of creatures that make up the Veleek. Visser Three demands water and Ax gets struck by it, but manages to recover in time to latch on to Marco as the two plummet out of the ship miles above the planet. He morphs osprey in time and escapes.

The kids go home, Jake ending up grounded for his tardiness, while Rachel stays at Cassie's. The next day, Jake is greeted by Marco, who says that they may have a way to defeat the Veleek. Everyone goes to Cassie's barn, but make sure not to use any morphs. Cassie has a plan that may be able to stop the Veleek once and for all, but she insists on being the one to go through with it, since she suddenly feels guilty for letting Marco get caught earlier. I guess it's been a while since Cassie's had a crisis. But so is Tobias who is pissed that he slept through this whole situation. But they work together for Cassie's plan. Since the Veleek was having problems carrying Rachel in Elephant morph, and the creature has an aversion to water, the logical solution is to morph whale. Ah, now I get it. It's less your existential crisis and more because you had that weird whale trip back in #4. Who the hell you fooling Cassie?

The plan to get the Veleek's attention involves Cassie doing a multitude of morphs at one time. The kids find a whale and the Animorphs morph Dolphin to catch up to it. Cassie demorphs, has her whine fest about how it's "not right" to acquire the whale without permission, but still does so anyway. She then morphs cockroach and rides Tobias' back, then jumps off, morphs human again, then finally whale. The Veleek arrives and tries to grab whale Cassie, only for it to collapse into the water and dissipate. The creature is dead and the Animorphs have won. And that's really it. No conclusion chapter or anything, we hit the page quota so we out.

Megamorphs is an interesting concept, but kind of clunky in execution. As a story with less importance to the general canon, it's fine. There are some really gripping action sequences involving the Veleek which are great to read. And the book, while long, flows fine enough for the most part. Though with that being said, there are a ton of issues I had with this book. The structure is kind of a mess and the idea of giving narration from all the characters makes for a lot of pages that just recap the situation from another character's perspective, feeling like we're repeating pages and dialogue in certain situations. Also, despite the addition of this new format, the focus isn't all that well divided between all six Animorphs. Tobias gets like three chapters, two being near the end, and is given barely anything to do. Ax gets some stuff, but less focus, and Cassie feels lacking as well.

Rachel gets the lions share of the chapters and it's to give us a rather, for lack of a better term, forgettable amnesia story that just gives us stuff that doesn't matter in the end. Whatever happened to the former controller woman in the forest that tried to kill Rachel? She just vanishes. Getting more focus on that angle is a lot more intriguing than Rachel wandering around not knowing who she is. And in the end with how quickly she recovers her memories, it just feels like filler while Applegate has to pad 220 odd pages about the Animorphs fighting an alien cloud. Also, the book feels like it lacks a quality conclusion. We just pad the ending with Cassie giving herself yet another existential crisis for no reason and retread her issues from #4. Weird, I remember liking Cassie more when I first read these, but now she's becoming a pain in the head. And the book just ends immediately after killing the Veleek, like Applegate really didn't know how to end this in any satisfying manner. Issues aside, Megamorphs #1 wasn't horrible, but definitely feels like it didn't need to exist outside of being a product intended to entice new readers to the series. It has a few fun bits, but is the first real book of the bunch I'd call skippable. C-.