First up:  Bragging time!

Okay, with that out of the way, on to the review.

After the beach incident, the kids all split up and go their separate ways for a while.  Also, apparently Rachel’s mom won a “Lawyer of the Year” award, which is probably the most bland award ever.  Really, it sounds like something they’d give out in-office, like Employee of the Month or Perfect Attendance, except you wouldn’t expect that to come with a ceremony attached.

Then one day Jake shows up to see her and is totally cool about being immediately put to work and IT’S ADORABLE.  On the other hand…it’s been several days, guys, and the last message you had from Ax was ‘I’m running out of time.’  And Jake is only just now bringing up to Cassie that they should probably do something.

I know there’s a whole ‘wake up, go to school, save the world’ trope, but the entertainment factor in that is watching the two lives mesh and conflict, not being totally chill with taking off several days.  If you have to take time out from saving the world to do your homework, that should be conflict right there, not an off-hand paragraph that makes it sound like no one really cares.

Rachel and Marco were talking about whether it might have just been something they imagined, you know? Because you made it seem so real and all.

You turn into animals and use telepathy and fight body-snatching aliens.  What part of more telepathy is so hard to comprehend?  It’s not even honestly a dream we’re talking about here, because twice Cassie has had it while fully awake.  (Or, well, starting fully awake and then passing out.)  Plus, did they think they just imagined the news story and the being-shot-at and the fact that V3 is totally getting these messages as well?

And yet, the central point in Jake and Cassie’s conversation is deciding if it’s all real or not.  This would really work a lot better without the news story and the trip to the beach, because by this point they’ve got a lot more than Cassie’s dreams to go off of.

“I don’t know, Jake. It’s a dream. It’s like a vision or something. How do I know if it’s real?”

1) Passing out twice.

2) Talks just like Elfangor did.

3) V3 is having visions, too.

4) Bit of an Andalite ship washed up on shore.

5) Shot at by Controllers.

Take your pick.

And Cassie’s farm has been in the family for generations.  So, is it still an intact farm?  Do they grow anything, or do they just have a farm-sized plot of land that’s laying fallow?  Because that strikes me as incredibly wasteful.  Add that to the horses, and these people really don’t appear to know what they’re doing.

“I believe these dreams are real. I believe there’s an Andalite out there, somewhere … somehow … trapped. Calling for help.”

So why did you spend the past several days calmly going about your business without any worry or angst at all?  (Or mention it if you did have worry and angst?)  Do you just not care about the Andalite that you totally believe is stuck and running out of air?

Aaaand then Cassie whines about morphing dolphins because they’re so intelligent.  I honestly have no idea why she thinks intelligence has anything to do with the matter, because that’s literally all she says about it.  Morphing intelligent animals is wrong because….reasons.

“Cassie,” he said, “I would rather shovel manure with you than do homework without you, any day.”

Cute has distracted me.  I’m happy again.

So, Cassie decides they really will morph something and go help the alien, and the next day everyone gathers at the Gardens.

Only they don’t call it a zoo, they call it a “wildlife park.”

Because they are really pretentious hippies. 

Seriously, we’ve seen this place in action.  It’s a zoo.

and listened to my Walkman.

Teeeheeeheee, oh, 90s.

Talk, talk, random filer, roller coasters, and then dolphins!  They watch the dolphins play around and then ooh and aah over them and talk to the trainer. 

“How is doing this any different than what the Yeerks do?”

Rachel looked surprised. “Yeerks take over humans,” she said. “Besides, they don’t morph, they infest. We don’t take over the actual animal, we just copy his DNA pattern, create a totally new animal, and then – ”

“And then control the new animal,” I said.

“It’s not the same,” Rachel insisted. But she looked troubled.

“It’s something I’ll have to think about,” I said. “It’s kind of been bothering me.”

I just…I don’t even…Cassie, what is wrong with you?  You don’t ‘control’ the new animal any more than you control your own body.  You turn into something.  You are the animal.  The fact that you talk about instincts as ‘animal brains’ doesn’t mean that there’s a literal second brain in there.  It’s your brain.  You aren’t hurting anything.

It really does seem like she’s intimating that they create a second animal and then…possess it, somehow, which admittedly is a cool concept, it’s just not even close to what they do.  I’m not sure if the authors meant to make it unclear if that’s what’s going on and they just dropped the ball, or if this was just some half-thought-out thing that got thrown in to meet the monthly quota of angst per book.

Anyway, they get to feed and pet the dolphins, so acquiring them is easy.

The next day they all meet at a river to morph and then swim down into the ocean.  Cassie goes first and is happy to discover that there’s not actually a completely separate consciousness in her brain with her, because really Cassie, why the fuck would there be?  Being a dolphin is all sorts of fun, so they all morph and go out and goof off for a while. 

And by ‘a while’ I mean nearly an hour.  Tobias has to yell at them to make them realize they’d gone full-dolphin.  They still don’t get it and they try to turn ‘find the spaceship’ into a game instead, but get distracted when Cassie discovers echolocation. 

Except for the fact that it’s all basically filler, this part was pretty cute.  I still like the way it’s so easy for the kids to get lost in their morphs, like it’s just a totally natural thing that comes with the process and not some big and dramatic switchover.

Suddenly, a shark!

*sigh*  Are we ever going to get to the spaceship?

Blah blah, and there’s filler while they fight sharks off from a whale.  They win, but Marco gets hurt and has his tail almost chewed off.  Cassie figures out that if he demorphs and morphs again, he should theoretically be cured, but honestly I’m just boggled that they all made it this far into the series without anyone getting seriously injured.  In fact, now that I think about it…it sort of detracts from the horror to have them get out of every scrape and scrap without any pain so far.  I’m glad that little feature didn’t stick around for long.

Marco demorphs and is fine, and then the whale picks him up on its back and starts fucking talking to Cassie, because apparently whales and dolphins are telepathic now.    

I know they’re cool animals and all that, but even if they are intelligent enough to communicate complex ideas instead of basic information, I really doubt they’d do it through some mystical, magical heart-of-the-ocean connection.