Between my adolescence and adulthood, I lost track of possibly my most favorite book series ever - the Animorphs. Growing up, Applegate just wasn't releasing the books fast enough for me to read them - and it so happened that somewhere around Book #28, my academic studies overwhelmed my ability to keep up.
I chanced back on to Animorphs a month back, expecting to be completely hate or at least, dislike the books a bit. After all, despite the nostalgia, the books were meant for kids. Or so I thought.
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The Ellimist Chronicles' is a cracker of a science fiction book. Forget the "Young Adult", "For kids", etc. tags: the book is good enough to be read standalone by someone who has no clue about the Animorphs series. I have never read an author trying to take a crack at the creation of life itself, and Applegate does it spectacularly with this book.
The only reason I found it a little disconcerting is because I had no clue who the Ellimist was narrating his story to. I later learnt that this is the penultimate book in the series and hence, quite a lot had transpired in the Yeerk/ Andalite/ Human war. And thus, the confusion was warranted. Without that small issue, '
The Ellimist Chronicles' is a splendid timeless science fiction masterpiece for all ages.
'The Ellimist Chronicles' is a cracker of a science fiction book. Forget the "Young Adult", "For kids", etc. tags: the book is good enough to be read standalone by someone who has no clue about the Animorphs series. I have never read an author trying to take a crack at the creation of life itself, and Applegate does it spectacularly with this book.
The book was disappointing. Hastings goes back and forth between two timelines, and tends to use present tense for things that happened in the past far too often for my comfort. Even so, the source material is interesting enough: feuds between Obama, McChrystal and the bureaucracy, the whole elaborate pretense that the war was worthwhile or even, being won, was fascinating.
I used to love Animorphs as a kid. The series was so much richer than the other "young adult" fiction that was peddled to us - more poignant, more 'science' in the fiction. However, as an adult I struggled to finish one of Applegate's books. The plot was just too thin for my grown-up sensibilities.
I would have never read this book, if it wasn't free with Prime Reading. It reads like something hurriedly compiled off Wikipedia/ the internet. Far too many grammatical and spelling errors to be a tolerable book. The only reason I managed to finish it is because I found the source material of some of the stories interesting.
