Jake decides that he’s got to acquire the tiger in order to calm it down so it doesn’t eat them.  Although, they spend quite a while talking about this plan, and the tiger doesn’t attack.  In fact, throughout this scene, we have no idea what the tiger is doing.  We have a description of its size, but not its activity.  We  have no idea if it’s at a distance and approaching them, if it’s stalking around them in a threatening circle, if it’s taking a nap, if it’s just sitting there waiting for food (since, remember, these doors are generally used by zoo staff to feed the tiger).  We have no idea how much danger is real and how much is in Jake’s head.  Yeah, of course, he’s going to be scared even if the tiger is napping, but it’s still a bit flat for the reader.

Only when Jake finally starts to approach do we find out that the tiger is just sitting there uncaring.  They have about ten seconds to run after Jake acquires it, but they spent more than 10 seconds bantering, so…  Whatever, their plan to calm down the already calm tiger works, and they run through the habitat and climb out a ladder.  And…are immediately spotted by guards, because they’re climbing out of a frikkin tiger exhibit.  They lose the guards in the crowd and meet up with the others.

It turned out the other three had not been chased at all. They’d lost the guards easily, and had just gone on acquiring morphs

What he really means is that Rachel acquired a morph.  Tobias and Cassie apparently just wandered off into lala land.

The most annoying thing was that none of them even believed our story. Marco and I were a little resentful over that.

…why wouldn’t they?  I mean,  “I accidently hid in a tiger habitat and had to climb a ladder to get out” is probably the most believable story in this book.

My mom’s a writer, so she hates TV unless it’s one of her favorite programs.

Hi, Mrs. Berenson!  I love you.

Over family dinner, Jake tries to get Tom to say what he’s doing that night, and Tom gives evasive answers.  I’m not sure why Tom can’t just lie, or say “I’ve got a Sharing meeting,” or…well, anything less suspicious than “shut your pie hole.”  I mean, their parents are right there.  Parents generally get curious when their teenage son says “I won’t tell you what I’m doing tonight, nyanyanya.”

And Jake keeps pressing the issue, even knowing that Tom already suspects him.  Which, fine, Jake’s a little unsmart when it comes to his family so I can accept that he wouldn’t be entirely analytical about how to deal with it.  But there’s not really any fallout from this.  He does it…and then he gets away with it.

After Tom leaves, Jake calls up the others but finds out that Cassie is missing.  She was apparently kidnapped while out feeding animals in the barn, which also seems a bit suspicious.  The Yeerks can’t run around killing kids, but they can kidnap them from their homes?  At least take her from school, when her parents won’t notice if she’s gone for a couple of hours and Chapman can hand-wave the absence report.  (And, you know, where there’s less chance of her parents looking out the window and asking “why is that police man dragging our daughter away?”)

…So, Cassie’s parents don’t really care and aren’t going to look for her.  Jake says he’s going to look for her, and her mom kind of goes “*shrug* Yeah, whatever.”  I’m…kind of curious about Cassie’s home life now.

Jake gets to school and Tobias is already a hawk.  And…stays a hawk.  I know he really likes flying and all, but he could at least reset the clock before going in.  And hawks aren’t great for, you know, underground locations.  It’s fine that Tobias is stubborn about it, but none of the other kids bring this up.  (Especially that whole “you can’t fly very well underground and we’re supposed to be in a fucking battle” bit.)  Heck, they made him demorph to go to the beach, but they won’t do it for this?

They all break in through a window and see a bunch of people in the halls heading down to the pool.  They think they might be able to just walk in pretending to be controllers, and then they see the policeman dragging Cassie through the secret closet door.

They decide their best bet is just walking in.  But what about Tobias?

I looked at Tobias. “Too late for you to morph back now. But try not to let them see you.”

How is it too late?  Why can’t they wait the extra three minutes it would take?  Or at least go down in stages, have Tobias and maybe Rachel come down afterwards.  It’s not like carrying a fucking hawk into the pool is un-suspicious. 

I know he’s supposed to get stuck in that morph, but good lord this is so contrived.  There’s other ways to manage it. 

The stairs were steep and there was no rail, so you felt like you were about to pitch forward with every step.

You can always tell who’s a Controller and who’s not by looking for people who look like they fell down the stairs.

They arrive in an enormous cavern that’s under half the town.  In California.  One good earthquake and Ani-town turns into a sinkhole.

Taxxons, Hork-Bajir, and other things I couldn’t even begin to guess at.

I wish we’d gotten to see more of those “things.”  The books mostly stick to just the two main aliens. 😦

The description of the pool is pretty good, as is their reaction to it.  They finally realize the scope of what they’re up against, and for that matter, so do the readers.  And this is an appropriate place to realize that.  They watch the un-infesting and re-infesting process, and that’s suitably horrible as well.  All of it, really, is pretty skin-crawling and gave me nightmares as a kid, though right now I’m more thinking “so, are they just standing still on the stairs watching all this?”

While the text comes up with some awesomely horrible things to describe, and does a decent job with that description, it also has a tendency to completely grind to a halt while it revels in the terror. 

Then Tobias flies off and absolutely no one in the pool notices that there’s a fucking hawk flying around.  I mean, I know it’s big, but just the fact that there’s movement where there shouldn’t be would draw attention.  And he doesn’t just find a perch and then sit there, he flies all over the place.

Tobias tells them what’s going on with Cassie.  But apparently doesn’t reassure Cassie that the others are there to rescue her. 

“If I have to die, okay. But don’t let them take me. Don’t let them put one of those things in my head.”

EXCUSE ME WHILE I GO HAVE MORE MARCO FEELZ.

Someone sees Jake and Marco off in a corner chatting and decides that looks suspicious, so he yells at them.  Rachel morphs into an elephant and charges at him.  For the sake of my sanity, I’m just going to assume that one Controller thought Jake and Marco were also Controllers, but that hiding in corners of the Yeerk pool is frowned upon.  Maybe the Yeerk army has a big mutiny problem.

Rachel causes a very nice distraction by murdering a bunch of aliens, giving the other kids time to morph.  Now, unlike my Hunger Games review, I’m not all that upset that they don’t care about the murdered aliens here.  Not murdering our own kind is built into our DNA, but we don’t have similar reservations about other creatures (unless they happen to be young and cuddly).  We can be conditioned to care about the killing of non-humans, but it’s also easier to be conditioned not to care.  And later having insect-looking Taxxons come down and try to take over your planet is some pretty strong “conditioning.”  Plus, we really don’t know what our instincts would do when faced with sentient non-bipeds, so aliens are pretty up in the air as far as human reactions to them go.

While everyone else is focusing on the elephant, Jake and Marco morph.  (They don’t take off their shoes, first, though.  Do they leave behind a pile of child-sized clothing after this?  Did they walk into the pool barefoot?)

The battle is…decent.  There’s still a lot of stopping the action to describe stuff, but the actual fighting parts are emotionally charged and they avoid the “robot narrator dictating everything in perfect sequence” problem.

When there’s a break in the attacking, they run over to the cages and try to let people out.

Marco did something very human to reassure them. He made a little bow, then crooked his finger at them as if to say come on out.

MARCO IS GALLANT RESCUER! 

MARCO YOU CAN RESCUE ME ANY DAY!

*reminds self that he’s only 13*  Yes, well, moving on.

Then everyone realizes Cassie is about to infested, because when a tiger, and elephant, and a gorilla attack your pool, it’s just business as usual?

Tobias attacks the guy trying to force her down and Cassie breaks free.  All the other uninfested people break free as well and start running, and Cassie morphs into a horse while in the middle of them.

All of these people will be recaptured.  It doesn’t matter if they aren’t Yeerks at the moment, sometime soon, they will have a Yeerk in their heads.  A Yeerk that can read their memories.  Memories of watching Cassie turn into a horse.  At least someone had to notice that; even when you’re running from aliens, girls turning into horses is pretty strange.

They all start running for the stairs and almost make it, until Visser Three steps out.  He says he knows that they are Andalites and he taunts them like a Bond villain before turning into a…fire breathing tentacle monster.  Awesome.

Part of me wants to say “why doesn’t Visser Three realize that these ‘Andalites’ only morph earth creatures?” and then I remember that when Ax shows up, all he’s got is one bird he acquired in training.  Although that just begs the question “why to the Andalites give this power to absolutely everyone if they barely ever use it?”

…can you imagine the kind of trouble idiot Andalite recruits could get up to with morphing?  They could turn into each other and swap places to get out of duty, imitate each other and do stupid shit to get that person in trouble, pose as superior officers. Which, really, would cause all sorts of problems.  Why do they give this incredible power to everyone and not just the few people who actually need it?  Are Andalites just…really, really trustworthy?

I saw Tom out of the corner of my eye. He was swinging his fists at a pair of Taxxons that were circling around him. Tom couldn’t hurt them, but he was trying just the same.

Tom and Jake’s mom.  And their dad.  And Jake.  And okay, the whole Berenson family.  I want to snuggle them.

Clearly, Jake comes from a long line of badassery.

They retreat up the stairs, but Rachel has to demorph to climb.  She doesn’t go fully human, but she does throw out some distinctly non-Andalite features, all while the whole fucking Yeerk army is staring at her.  How can they not realize that she’s not an Andalite?

And then TOM TRIES TO PUNCH V3 BECAUSE THAT’S JUST HOW AWESOME HE IS.  I mean, he gets his ass whooped, but still. 

The others finally escape and run off into the night.

Visser Three had made one mistake. He was too large in his morph to follow us much farther up the stairs.

Apparently the idiot also blocked the way so that none of his minions could give chase, either.

The final count was exactly one human freed — the woman who rode Cassie’s back up out of that hellish pit.

And that is the last we will ever hear of her.  Even within this book, they don’t say where she went or anything.  Just, she got out, and…???

Cassie said we didn’t have to worry about [the policeman] anymore. She didn’t want to talk about what had happened to him.

So, by implication, Cassie either killed him or watched someone else kill him.  (There were a lot of running Hork-Bajir, one of them could have just bumped into him and done him in.)  Either way, for the first time in this book, EXCUSE ME WHILE I GO HAVE CASSIE FEELS!

It’s a shame Cassie doesn’t narrate until #4.  Enough time and angst happens between this and then that she’s justified in not mentioning it, but it would have been nice to see her reaction.  If she did kill him, then she’s the first in the group to cause the death of an innocent human.

Later that night, Tobias shows up at Jake’s house and reveals that he’s now stuck.  The bit with Jake trying to tell him to morph back even though he knows the truth always tugs at my heartstrings a little.

I nodded and wiped away my tears. “Yeah,” I said. “Until then, we fight.”

*wibbles* 

Okay, and that’s the end of the first book.  Tomorrow we start The Visitor.