Rather silly. ( )

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This was one of the light ones. Stupid, ridiculous and pointless maybe, but funny as heck. The Animorphs find out that some famous guy is using his television presence to promote the Sharing- which could of course rope tons more innocent humans into being Yeerks, so they have to stop him. They use squirrel morphs (which sounded fun, I wish they'd spent more time as squirrels) to sneak into his mansion, and then morph cockatiels to fly around undetected, as the guy has a huge bird collection he lets free roam his house. I liked that it was difficult for them to actually put their hands on the birds in order to acquire them- that's pretty realistic. (Side note: I thought surely cockateils don't say "twooit" but I looked up a video of one screaming and yeah, they do kind of sound like that!) So they find out this guy is kind of unhinged but keeps his cover by pretending to be kind and love animals, as the human host does. They decide to use animal morphs to antagonize him in public so people will see him acting violently towards animals and it will ruin his image. All kinds of ridiculous hijinks ensue. Of course half the plans go wrong. Especially because Marco is suffering from extreme stress- not only due to the ongoing alien warfare but also because his father is dating a woman without realizing Marco's mother might still be alive. So now Marco randomly looses control of his morphs, becoming a meld of two animals at once- the spider/skunk one was pretty alarming- and he doesn't tell his friends about it at first. They all find out pretty quick, though. In the end, Marco morphs his father's girlfriend's poodle (which he detests) and uses it to continually harass the guy until he goes berserk in the tv studio, they catch it on live film and success! but only just barely managing to avoid blowing their own cover, of course. Through all this, Cassie shows a lot of compassion towards Marco trying to help him talk through his angst about his father's situation, and about the war in general- she's got some pretty levelheaded advice, too. Don't dwell on what should or shouldn't have happened in the past. Deal with what's happening right now. Although all her talking doesn't really help- it's Jake yelling at Marco to pull himself together that does it at the end.

from the Dogear Diary ( )

Marco's father is thinking about getting married again.

I love the poodle morph. I laughed at how Marco enjoys being an annoying poodle to get the Yeerk to lose his cool. ( )

A short comment for every book of the series until I get a chance to re-read them. All three of my sons and I loved this series and read every single book - I even bought every single book (most, but not all, used; some through school book sales). I'm excited to re-read them to see how the five main characters develop and to watch all the different transformations again. ( )