![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thistlechaser
Back to Before (Animorphs #40.5) by K.A. Applegate.
Quick synopsis: What if the Animorph kids never walked through that construction site and so never got morphing powers? Never knew about the Yeerk invasion? This book explores that what-if.
Brief opinion: How did I miss or skip this book back during my first read of the series? It was so good! Like the best kind of fanfic, it put the perfectly in-character characters into a totally different situation.
Plot: Jake, as PTSD as all the other kids, is in bed after an especially bad battle. The last words of a dying human controller keep playing over and over in his head, begging Jake for help. The minion of the evil god-like alien shows up and tempts him with an offer to roll back history, change the past. No longer will Jake and his friends have to fight this war alone, they could be normal kids...
What the minion doesn't tell Jake is that everything else would be the same. The war, the invasion, Jake's brother being a controller... all that but the kids would no longer know about it and would have zero ways to fight and defend themselves.
Unsurprisingly everything goes bad. Surprisingly the kids die one by one. Not off-scene, not implied, they die slowly and painfully and there are no attempts to hide what's happening to them.
Editing: Probably the best edited book so far. I didn't spot any typos (though I was completely lost in the story, so I might have missed some).
What I Liked/What I Didn’t Like: It's so clear this was a Michael Grant book. It was clearly his writing and his exact kind of story. I love that man, he writes the darkest stuff. I mean he killed these children. These poor kids who have been fighting for the planet, fighting without support, for a couple years now. And they died one by one, in pain and in blood and in fear.
The whole book was like great fanfic, the kind where the author puts the characters into a completely non-canon situation and you get to watch it all play out. Military men now running a coffee shop, alien race now high school kids, that sort of thing.
Rating: 1-Hated / 2-Disliked / 3-Okay / 4-Liked / 5-Loved: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️- Loved. Even though this was a Megamorphs book (so longer than the usual books), it was still way too short.
-----
DNF #29: The Full Moon Coffee Shop by Mai Mochizuki (Translator: Jesse Kirkwood). Me not liking this book is totally on me. I read the reviews and was pretty sure I would dislike it, but the title and a cat on the cover won me over.
I should have listened to the reviews. The writing didn't hook me at all (the writing in translated books never hook me), but the story was the real issue. Do you like astrology? Think a person's/character's entire life should be based on it? Romance, work, where to live, what to eat, all based on your star sign? Then this book's for you!
The cats weren't even real cats, they walked on two feet.
