“Creepy,” Rachel agreed. “Like if you took cheerleaders, combined them with gym teachers, and made them all drink ten cups of coffee.”

Wait, but, last chapter you went on about how everything was normal, and now everyone is agreeing that things are un-normal?  Come on, Jake, be consistent.  Show us some of this too-cheerfulness back when you were describing the party; don’t save it all up for here.  This is just “telling” with dialogue instead of narration.  (Even if it is funny telling.)

Jake decides he’s going to morph into Homer and get close to the meeting of full members.  Tobias comes down and lets them know where the member meeting is, then has an argument with Jake about whether or not need he needs to demorph.  Jake wins, and frankly, I find this scene a much better argument for his “natural leadership” than having Tobias and Cassie just flat out tell him so.

Jake reminds himself not to get lost in being a dog, then immediately get lost in being a dog.  I always have and always will enjoy how “sneaky” the instincts in morphs are.

He finds he can walk straight into the group, since none of the guards care about a stray dog.

I was beginning to realize why the Andalite had given us the power to morph. There are things you can do as an animal that you could never do as a human.

I don’t know, that seems a bit of a stretch.  First of all, Jake is talking like Elfangor had so many options, and he picked morphing because it fit the best.  When, really, they got the morphing power because that was (ostensibly) the only thing available.  What Jake brings up is more of an argument for why the Andalites would develop the tech, not why Elfangor would give it to them.  Also, later in the books multiple alien characters make a big deal out of high diverse and dense life is on earth, which makes me wonder how useful morphing is on a different planet.  If we’re unusual, is the more usual setup one of sparse, relatively homogenous life?  Because that would impact the usefulness of said morphing, unless the developed it to imitate other soldiers/enemies/sentient parties.

Yeah, it’s a bit nitpicky, but we haven’t met yet.  Hi.  I run a blog where I read books and pick nits.

So Jake gets close enough to listen in on the meeting and hears when Chapman shows up.  Chapman says they’re still after the kids that were at the construction site.  So…wait, they actually know that there were kids there and not just more escaped Andalites, like they assume later in the books?  Uh….the Ellimist did it?

Tom says that one of them might be Jake!  Oh, wait, no, he says:

But it might be the one who’s my brother, Jake.

…cat across the keyboard?  Drunk editor?  The Ellimist likes funky semantics?

More to the point, why does he think Jake was there?  Just because he was at the mall that night?  I mean, that alone would be a good enough reason to look into it, but Jake (indeed, all of the kids) has been a perfect actor until this point.  He hasn’t been nervous, spacey, secretive, or changed his behavior at all.

Remember, they have limited personnel and need to take over the whole planet.  There’s only as many Yeerks as they brought with them, and that doesn’t seem to cover every person in town and leave enough left for the rest of the invasion, or else they’d have taken the town.  So they’ve got to pick and chose their targets.  Maybe it’s not a stringent selection process, but there’s got to be something in place.  Why would they waste one of their number on a 13 year-old kid on nothing more than a suspicion?  (For that matter, why would they take Tom, who’s still in high school?  He makes slightly more sense than Jake, depending on his position within the social structure, but still.)

To be fair, Tom does bring up the option of just killing him.  Seems like a much tidier option to me.

Jake, understandably, gets a bit upset over all this.  He also goes on about how they’re “everywhere,” all because Chapman is one of them too, but…eh.  It makes sense for him to think that right now.  He’s overwhelmed.  But if they were really “everywhere” they wouldn’t need to separate out “full members” from “casual members.”  It’s not that Jake thinks this way now, it’s that the book just runs with this from here on out, without any more investigation done.  Chapman and one cop are Controllers, therefore everyone is a Controller.  You know, except for all those people who aren’t.

Jake gets so upset that he gives in to being a dog, because the dog doesn’t care and is just happy to be outside.  He tries to stick around and listen more, but he can’t really pay attention because…well, his brother wants to kill him and that knowledge takes up a lot of brain space.  He comes out of his funk when he hears Cassie confronting the same police officer from earlier.  (Which, honestly, indicates they’ve got a pretty small cast.  What are the odds of randomly running into the same guy twice if there’s a large number of Controller cops around?)  He tells her to scram.

Cassie and Jake return to the rest of the group, and Jake has a nice bit on how seductive being an animal is.  It’s a lot less stress and FEELZ than being human.

Jake demorphs and tells everyone that happened, then mentions that Chapman said they couldn’t just kill everyone who “might” have been at the site.  I guess Jake was paying more attention than he let on earlier.

They all agree that not talking (and not dying) is a good idea, but Marco advocates just ignoring the whole deal, which makes Jake turn on his “NO I MUST SAVE TOM” mode.

The group breaks up, but Jake asks Cassie to help him find something small to spy with, so they go hunting lizards.

The next day at school Jake locks himself in his locker and morphs into the lizard.

It had been fairly creepy, just touching it to acquire its DNA pattern.

😦  Lizards are awesome.

Jake runs around like a lizard for a while, barely directing himself toward Chapman’s office, and I always forget how much page time is devoted to just weird animal stuff.  It’s fun, don’t get me wrong, but these are very short books, so the “whee, I’m a lizard” bits take up a disproportionate amount of space in them.  Also, Jake eats a spider.  He’s very upset over eating a spider.  And…yeah, I would be too.  Just because the world is ending doesn’t mean spiders are less gross, and he doesn’t sacrifice larger angst for the sake of spider angst.  I like that there’s always room for the little annoyances, that they don’t overshadow the big stuff they just sit there and make the kids go “shit, I got to deal with this too?”

He finds Chapman after Chapman steps on his tail and gets down to the business of sneaking around again.  Chapman leads Jake to a janitor’s closet, then reveals a secret entrance to the Yeerk pool. 

Later at the mall, Jake tells the others what happened.  For…what, the third time (?) this book they all decide that they need to do something, except for Marco who wants to stay out of it.  I don’t mind that it takes them a while to come to a conclusion, but that doesn’t make it any less repetitive to read about.  It’s just the same conversation with different window dressing.  Not everything that’s realistic makes for a good book.

“I’ll go with you,” Tobias said, “For the Andalite.”

I know Jake’s doing this for someone else, too, but at least Jake grew up with Tom.  Tobias met Elfangor for two seconds and figures that’s the same as a lifetime of familial attachment.  Not that these books have always been the most logical when it comes to the Tobias/Elfangor connection, claiming that there’s something other than DNA that got passed down when the boy was conceived.  Or…something.  (Really, Elfangor was a nothlit use a composite morph.  Tobias has like three daddies who are all clueless human men, if you really think about it.)

So, everyone agrees to go into the pool that night, because that’s when Tom is going back to feed.  Even Marco agrees.

“Oh, shut up!” he snapped. “You’re my best friend, you jerk. Like I’m going to let you go face all this alone?

MARCO!  *snuggles*  I HAVE MARCO FEELZ, OKAY?  GIVE ME A MOMENT.

*ahem*  Yes, moving on.  Cassie ruins the mood by talking about animal spirits.  I don’t care how poetic you get, Cassie, Marco just blew you out of the water with one “shut up.”

“Good grief,” Marco said. “Let’s all buy Birkenstocks and go hug some trees,”

And he just did it again.

I don’t normally hate Cassie, but she’s particularly annoying right now.

Not the point.  The point is, they need more morphs, so they go down to the zoo.

“I think that’s a mistake,” Rachel said. “Our one real weapon is the power to morph. We should acquire as many useful morphs as we can.”

And that’s the last we ever hear about that.  From here out, they only get new morphs right before they need them.  They don’t even keep talking about it and think “what if there’s a limit?”  They just drop the subject and talk about flea jokes.

But they also have an animal part, which is like a zoo, only cooler. They do dolphin shows, and there’s this whole section where you can get close to some of the safer animals. And this monkey habitat they have is like a whole monkey city, practically.

They’re cooler than a zoo, because they do…zoo stuff.

Meds are medicines. Sorry.

Woah.  I’m blown away by all the technical jargon, Cassie.  You’re going to have to dial it down a bit.

(This is what happens when a character annoys me too much.  I get in a mood to just tear into them.  There’s a point at which I cross from reading them like they’re a person, and move into reading them like they’re PSA I’ve been forced to sit through.)

Cassie takes them to the gorilla cage so that Marco can get his signature morph.  YAY BIG JIM!

“This is so cool,” Tobias commented. “You realize that gorilla could pull Marco apart like he was a paper doll. Look at those arms!”

Marco opened one eye. “Tobias? Being terrified gets in the way of concentrating. So how about if you shut up about his arms?”
Oh, Tobias. You’re so adorably clueless.

They move on, and Rachel wants a dolphin morph before the rest point out that “pool” is more euphemistic than literal.  Before they can decide where to go next, a security guard pops up and they all scatter.  The guard chases Jake and Marco, so they steal a golf cart and “speed away.”

I turned around to face forward. We had reached a “T” corner. “Right!” I yelled.

Naturally, Marco turned left. I nearly fell out.

SORRY, TIME FOR MORE MARCO FEELS.

They get stuck in a dead-end hall and have to hide behind a door.  One has a rhino in it, so they backtrack and try the second door.  It’s got a tiger!  Dun dun dun.