Jake makes it home in a few lines and…apparently has a normal evening after that?  Or maybe just goes straight to bed?  I mean, he just found out about aliens for the first time and discovered they want to take over the human race and also he was instructed to “warn your people,” and later in this very book he scoffs at the idea that his own family could be Controllers so that idea hasn’t taken hold yet, but he…doesn’t tell his parents?  Doesn’t act freaked out?  Doesn’t walk through the door and yell “HOLY SHIT, MOM, ALIENS, I TOTALLY SAW ALIENS, CALL CNN”?  Or, since he can’t really prove the aliens yet, at least act a little twitchy?

You’re weird, Jake.

I guess I should have had the worst nightmares of my life that night, but I didn’t. The world of nightmares was a joke compared to my new reality.

I’m actually not sure what’s going on here.  Is he saying that he just straight-up didn’t have a bad dream, or that he did have a bad dream, just not the worst bad dream he’s ever had?  Or that it was a bad nightmare, just not as bad as what he actually saw?

And…yeah, what he saw and now knows is pretty bad.  But there’s no build-up to this.  No point before this where he sits down and actually thinks about it and has it overcome him or anything like that.  He says his life is now worse than nightmares, but then the emotional tone button gets reset so that he can spend the whole book finally realizing that his life is now worse than nightmares.

It’s a nice dramatic line, but it’s completely out of context.

Tobias comes over and he’s bouncing-off-the-walls happy that he figured out how to morph.

I stopped yawning. My mouth actually snapped shut. Dude is Tobias’s cat. “Huh?”

How close are these two right now?  Really.  When Tobias is introduced, it’s by saying that he basically follows Jake around after that one time Jake saved him from bullies.  See:

Tobias figured I was his friend.

Tobias figured.  Jake didn’t.  So…does Tobias just prattle on about his life, is Jake exceptionally polite for a 13-year-old and asks small talk questions, is Jake psychic?

Tobias has the most screwed-up family I know. He never knew who his father was, and his mom just decided to leave him a few years ago. Since then he’d been shuttled back and forth between his uncle here, and his aunt, who lives on the other coast.

This is a really sad situation and I don’t object to it being included, but…does Tobias talk about being abandoned by his mother to people he just met?  Which is certainly one way to react, but knowing that to be the case would be a lot more indicative of his personality than just letting his situation hang there.

I’m really getting attached to this “Jake’s psychic” theory.

Tobias explains that he morphed simply by thinking really hard, and also that doing so made his real pet cat go nuts.

He clawed me up pretty good.“ Tobias stuck a sliced finger into his mouth.

Because…thinking about it made it start bleeding again?  Because Tobias has a fixation on his own fingers?  Because Freudian slip?

So, here we go, morphing not helping out with Tobias’s cut finger.  Not only is that a plot hole for later books, but…it doesn’t come as an issue until #4, so does that mean no one gets injured in the battles they have in books 1-3?  Now I can’t remember.  Let’s keep reading and find out.

“Not a dream,” he said. Now he was serious Tobias again. The grin was gone. “It’s all true, Jake. All of it.”

If you can turn into a cat, that means that parasitic aliens must exist.

It is all true, and Tobias is, was, and always will be a little too eager about this whole ‘let’s dive right into warfare’ thing (ever notice that?) but that still doesn’t mean that his logic is sound.  Elfangor could have been lying, or mistaken, or some sick intergalactic scientist performing sociology experiments with “lesser” species like we do with rats.  All that isn’t true, but the kids don’t know that yet.

Jake can’t decide if he wants to believe the incident really happened or not, and he’s kind of leaning toward the side of mass-hallucination, so Tobias decides he needs to demonstrate morphing to prove the point.

And yes, the morphing bits are totally awesome.  The author really went all out with the body horror for some of these, and she gives due attention to the fact that it is body horror.  Well, a form of it, at least, since the kids are mostly grossed out and not in pain and doing it on purpose.  There’s a really delightful mix of “this is so creepy” and “this is so fascinating” at the same time.

They sit around and play with telepathy, and there’s another plot hole where Jake can “send” thoughts to Tobias.  It will never be mentioned again.  Unless you count making it onto a list of KASUs.  (I adore the fact that this fandom actually has a term for that.)

“Pull a string? Why?”

I love this part of the books.  Not just that it’s a thing that happens, but the way it’s introduced, just as a matter of course.  There’s no big reveal, no talking about it, no ‘oooo, what is this mysterious urge I have?’  Tobias just wants some string.  Not just clever, but also shows up insidious these animal instincts are, that they don’t really announce themselves but rather sneak up on you.

He pounced! He landed on the string, grabbed it in his sharp teeth, rolled over, and began ripping at the string like it was the only thing on Earth that mattered.

I tried pulling the string away, but he pounced again.

On the other hand, Jake isn’t morphed, but apparently he sees no problem with just sitting around and playing with a cat for two pages.

I’d really love to track it. To follow it so quietly. To listen to its heartbeat. To hear its scratchy little feet. I’d wait till just the right moment, and then a perfect pounce through the air, claws stretched out …

This kind of stuff is a staple for the kids’ inner narration, but it also shows up surprisingly often in their actual speech, and it’s quite awkward to read.  I mean…who talks like this?

Jake is convinced that Tobias can turn into a cat, but at the same time he doesn’t want anything to do with this alien business, because…um, he still thinks it’s a dream?  Scared?  Hasn’t had his coffee yet?

“I will,” he said. “But we’ll need you, Jake. You most of all.”

Hello, Gary Stu. 

Yeah, I don’t mind the whole ‘shoved into a leadership role because he’s actually good at it’ trope, but it would be nice to see Jake actually be good at it before people go off deciding that he’s the lynchpin of the whole group.  It’s not like there’s a lot going on in his ‘normal’ life that indicates he’d be super good at this.  These books are short, so I guess they felt the need to summarize some characterization, but still.  They could have declared him the leader at the end of the book.  No reason to start in on it now.

But Tobias calls Jake the leader, and Jake completely abandons his whole “no, I don’t wanna war” attitude of five seconds ago.  He just shrugs and goes to get his dog so he can practice morphing.  They spend several pages on the process, before Jake finally descends into Homer-mode and goes nuts sniffing everything.  Like Tobias with the string, it’s just a thing that happens, not even painted as weird (to the characters, it’s very weird to the audience) until Tobias finally makes him calm down. 

Jake’s brother Tom shows up, and Jake sniffs him and gets an odd scent. 

My dog brain couldn’t quite identify it. It was an unsettling, dangerous smell. And somehow, in my own mind, I heard the echo of a laugh. A very human laugh I had heard the night before as Visser Three swallowed the Andalite whole.

Neon paint would be less subtle.

Tobias leaves, and Jake calls everyone to arrange a meeting at Cassie’s farm.  Tom comes in as he’s wrapping up.

The thing is, Tom should have been the very first person I told about all the stuff that had happened. But as I was sitting there watching him munch toast, I just had this feeling. This feeling that said No, this has to be a secret. Even from Tom.

Psychic!

Since Jake’s spideysense warned him away from talking about aliens, they talk about basketball instead, and we find out Tom quite the basketball team and his personality has just generally been shifting.  We also get our first mention of the Sharing when Tom invites Jake to join.

Jake arrives last at Cassie’s farm, which is always called a farm, but we never see more than the barn.  Do they just have a lot of land that stays fallow, or do they do actual farming on the side, or is it just a hold-over name?  The other kids show Jake a news story which claims that the “mysterious lights” from the night before were just firecrackers.

Because roaring beasts from space sound like firecrackers?

Of course it’s possible that people still believe so bad juju went down, but dissenting opinions are kept out of the official paper.  But actually, that just brings up a larger issue.  Stuff like this happens quite often through the books, where the Yeerks have to cover up some mysterious goings-on, but there’s never any sense that the general population picks up on this.  The Ani-town should be the new Bermuda Triangle, the pilgrimage point of conspiracy nuts all over the country.  These incidents, which while small and explainable on their own, should have stacked up after a while.  Not even that long of a while, too.  I mean, these kids blow something up on average once a month for three years.  It would have been fascinating to see a slow build-up of public awareness, but instead the slate is wiped clean at the start of each book.

They all conclude that at least part of the police force is in collusion with the Yeerks.

“If the police have been infiltrated by the Controllers, who knows how many others have, too?” Rachel asked. “Teachers? People in the government? The newspapers and the TV?”

Nice and convenient that they figured this out before trying to tell anyone, because they all went home and…did homework or something last night.

We all felt the same terrible feeling – like we were all alone.

Psychic Jake can read your mind.

He knows what you’ve been thinking.

He knows when you’ve been sleeping.  He knows when you’re awake.

Better be good.

The kids all sort of talk about what happened, and Marco is all in favor of doing nothing about it.  He doesn’t want to get killed and leave his dad alone.  We continue to fail to bring up the whole “just tell someone and pass on the baton” option.

I mean, I know the Yeerks could be anywhere, but there’s ways to mitigate the risk.  Hitchhike to Canada or something, find some backwoods place that the Yeerks would have no reason to be in, find a reporter, and say “Hey, I’m about to make you famous.”  After that reporter records as much as possible, high-tail it out of there, do the same in another tiny town, lather, rinse, repeat.  They can’t get you if you’re on the move, and even if they find one or two of the reporters before the story goes viral, they can’t get all of them.

I mean, kind of a shitty thing to do to the reporters, but you could still warn them to also stay on the move and let them decide if they want to take on the risk or not.

True, these kids are 13, and I’m not expecting them to geniuses.  It would be one thing to have them get this information dumped on them and then they think “well, oh shit, got to fight now” because they’re just too overwhelmed to come up with other options.  But they never really consider this sort of an option even after three years of painful warfare.  Not until the end, anyway, and even then they only tell the governor.  (And…only tell her.  Jesus, guys, you could have given her some video proof so she didn’t end up in the looney bin.)

…the Ellimist did it?

Cassie shows up in horse-morph and shows off how good she is at controlling it.

I decided I’d better be a gentleman and look away. […] But I noticed that as Cassie emerged from the horse she was wearing a skintight blue outfit.

lol, you didn’t look very far away, did you, Jake?

Then the cops show up!  They can very clearly see his car coming straight at them down a dirt road.  No obstructions, clear line of sight.  Meaning, he can see them as well.

“Which way should I morph?” Cassie wailed. “Horse or human?” She reared up slightly on her hind legs.

Cassie, you have just doomed the planet.  Unless your horse-half is the size of a small pony, the cop just saw that.

Apparently Cassie’s horse-half is really small.  Or maybe the police officer wasn’t paying attention.  She turns human before they come face-to-face, so the officer just shrugs off the fact that there’s a barefoot teenager in a leotard being hidden by all her friends.

Well, okay, on second thought, teenagers are kind of strange like that.

The police officer is looking for the “fireworks” kids…by driving out to random farms and just asking?  Whaaaaa?  Anyway, he’s pretty obviously a Controller and invites them to the Sharing.

“Maybe Marco is right,” Rachel said. “This is too big for us. We’re just kids. We need to find someone important to tell this to. Someone we can trust.”

“We can’t trust anyone,” Tobias said flatly. “Anyone could be a Controller. We tell the wrong person, we are all dead. And the whole world will be doomed.”

We get a nod in this direction, but they just stop after this.  One policeman was a Yeerk, therefore they can’t trust a cameraman in New Salem, ND. 

For fuck’s sake, the Yeerks don’t even have enough people to take over everyone in this one small Ani-town, surely they can’t have global control of the media!

“I don’t want to stop morphing,” Cassie said. “Do you realize all we could do with this power? We could communicate with animals, maybe. Help save endangered species.”

I think this is why Cassie is the least favorite in the fandom.  Not that she moralizes, but that her priorities are more than a bit skewed.  She finds out about brain-stealing aliens, and her first concern is endangered animals.

They decide to vote on whether or not to fight “like the alien said” (stfu, Tobias, he said to “tell” first), and the result of their vote is to…take a nap and vote again later.

Dead Zone 5, which is this CD game we were going to play on my computer.

Aaaah, 90s.

Tom shows up while Marco and Jake are playing ‘CD games,’ and he starts talking about the fireworks story, because these secret invading aliens are the opposite of subtle.  Then he invites them both to join the Sharing again.

Marco points out the painfully obvious and says that Tom is a Yeerk.

I swung my fist and caught Marco in the side of the head.

Jake, the main character, is actually wrong and has an emotional reaction!  Guys, he’s allowed to be incorrect about something, omg, yaaaaay!  And while it’s obvious to everyone else reading the books, it’s also pretty clear that Jake is being willfully blind because he’s too emotionally invested in the issue. 

Guys, guys, guys IT’S AN ACTUAL CHARACTER FLAW THAT HAS ACTUAL CONSEQUENCES IN A YOUNG ADULT NOVEL!  OH, CHARACTERIZATION, I MISSED YOU!

It’s a bit sad, the things that get me excited after reading so many bad books.

Marco defeats Jake with a blanket.  Marco’s kind of awesome that way.

Tobias shows up as a red-tailed hawk at the window, because when has Tobias ever passed up an opportunity to not be human?  And the text doesn’t spend pages and pages “telling” us what this means about his character; we’re allowed to think and come to our own conclusions about that.  Excuse me while I go and swoon.

“I was riding the thermals.”

“What’s a thermal?” I asked.

“That’s when there’s warm air rising up from the ground. It forms this cushion under your wings. You can just float up there. Like a mile up! You just surf the thermals.

Either Tobias was already a nerd about flying, or bird instincts come with wikipedia knowledge. 

“No, the hawk. I mean, I think he knows they aren’t trying to hurt him or anything, but he can’t stand being cooped up there while his wing heals.” Tobias’s eyes darkened. “It’s terrible when birds have to be locked up in cages. They should be free.”

They point out in this section that the bird’s broken wing doesn’t get passed along with his DNA but…apparently his depression does?  Or maybe Tobias is just a bird-whisperer?

Tobias explains to the other two about Yeerk pools and how he got that information from Elfangor before he died.

“Anyway, he gave me … visions, I guess you’d call them. Pictures. Information. A lot of it, all at once. All jumbled. I haven’t even started to sort it all out. But I do know about the Yeerk pools and the Kandrona.”

Tobias will not come up with any further new information, so I guess even though he ‘hasn’t even started’ to unjumble it, he already knows everything?

Tobias wants to blow up the Yeerk pool, and he’s decided that he’s going to do that even if none of the others help him.  YOU GO, TOBIAS!

“That was before,” Tobias said softly. “Before the Andalite. Before he died trying to save us. I can’t let that go. I can’t let him die for nothing. So whatever you guys decide, I’m going to fight.”

Erm…you go, Elfangor?

Really, Tobias’s only motivation for saving the planet is because his only male relative provided a noble sacrifice?

He’s turning into a particularly stereotypical YA heroine.

Marco continues to be the only one to put 2 and 2 together and decides the Sharing is a Yeerk front.  Then he brings up the fact that Tom is a Controller again, and for some reason this time it actually makes Jake think, even though nothing has changed from before. 

Jake decides to go “lalala, not listening” and instead go to a Sharing meeting, saying everyone else is welcome, too.  They head down to the beach, and halfway there Tobias spontaneously decides to go hawk again, because he’s just so smart like that?  I get that he’s not supposed to be acting logically here, but he’s putting out warning signs left and right and none of the other kids pick up on it.

They hang out at the beach and the meeting is all kinds of cool and fun, then Tom brings up the concept of “full membership,” and I’m kind of scratching my head and wondering why Tom’s Yeerk is so big on Jake becoming a member.  He’s 13, how useful is really going to be to the invasion?

The real Tom breaks through for a moment and gives Jake this heartbreaking pleading/warning look, and I just remembered why Tom is my favorite bit character.  *wibbles*