Because life is a gradual series of revelations
That occur over a period of time
It's not some carefully crafted story
It's a mess, and we're all gonna die
If you saw a movie that was like real life
You'd be like, "What the hell was that movie about?
It was really all over the place."
Life doesn't make narrative sense - Crazy Ex Girlfriend
The second book of the Animorphs is narrated by Rachel. This is also one of the first books in the series I consider to be non-essential. When Katherine Applegate and Michael Grant were writing this series, they wrote it a bit like a comic book TV show from the 90s. Significant plot points would happen every now and then, but most episodes would be pretty self-contained storylines that didn’t require you to remember every episode that happened before and wouldn’t be required for the majority of what came after.
When I was a dorky quiet kid in grade school and someone in the grade above me saw me reading one of the Animorphs books, I was over a dozen books in by then, they pointed to them and said the books were “pointless.” When I asked what they meant they explained that the story never moved forward at all. Obviously, they got annoyed when I rolled my eyes and said that’s not true. At the time as well, I took offense to that. It hurts as a little kid to be told this thing you’ve sunk a lot of time into is pointless. As an adult who is now writing that the second book in the series is non-essential and most of them probably are non-essential1 to the overarching plot- I’d actually respond with something like “yeah, and?”
Look, most things in life are pointless in the grand scheme of things. If you are fighting a war this goes double. I’ll probably return to this theme of pointlessness being a virtue of the books, not a vice because it serves both a practical and thematic purpose.
Practical, because if you went to a library as a kid and they just happened to be missing the second book you could safely skip to book three or four without really missing much. This is the second book in the series, so obviously reading the first would be helpful but you could feel pretty safe about skipping most books and getting filled in on the important bits in future books.
Thematic, because as I said before, most things in life are pointless. These books have childish covers and are an exciting way to get children into the heads of different animals. But they are also war stories, and children fighting a war that feels impossibly beyond them should feel pointless.
In this non-essential book, right away we get a couple vignettes with the group that give us a good picture of Rachel’s character as well as some of the fun answers to the question “If you could become any animal what would you do with that ability?”
The book opens with the Animorphs flying above the city on thermals, pockets of hot air, as birds of prey. The descriptions of flying and diving are fun and the sorts of descriptions that are especially fun to dream about as a twelve-year-old kid.
I was falling! Falling, with nothing at all to stop me from splatting right into the ground!
It was like a nightmare.
We were going like sixty miles an hour, as fast as a speeding car. Sixty miles an hour, aiming right for the ground. But even though it was scary, it was also way cool.
Forget surfing. Forget skateboarding. Forget snowboarding. You haven’t had a thrill till you’ve ridden the thermals a mile into the air and then gone hurtling straight down at maximum speed.
Love it, extremely exciting. An ongoing debate in my household is if you were trapped as a nothlit2 what animal would be best to get trapped as and some sort of bird of prey like a hawk or a falcon is an obviously great choice. Flying sounds like such a joyful experience.
While flying around they notice a couple kids below them are trying to shoot birds in the sky and they decide to dive bomb them as birds and play a prank. They dive into the trees, and using speed gained from the dive and flying experience of the birds, relying on the bird instinct, they sneak up on the two shooters at very high speed stealing their gun, beer, and scaring them.
Tobias slashed the ponytail guy’s head with his own talons. Ponytail shouted in pain and surprise and loosened his grip on the rifle.
“Hey!” the second guy yelled. Zoom!
I was out of there with the rifle in my talons. With the additional weight of the rifle, it was a struggle getting any altitude. “That bird has your gun, Chester! And that other one stole my beer!”
I glanced over and saw Marco. At least I think it was Marco. He had the beer can in his talons, half-crumpled.
<They’re way too young to be drinking,> Marco said in his most parentlike voice.
The next day walking home alone from gymnastics Rachel is starting to be harassed by another punk in a car. In a more adult book this scene could easily be leading to a rape. The punk tells her to get in his car and then gets out of the car to approach this young girl. Rachel is scared, but more so she is angry and decides to use her elephant morph to turn around looking like a monster to scare the guy off.
Reckless. That is the one-word description to describe Rachel that all the Animorphs will eventually use repeatedly throughout the series. Admittedly, establishing this much more by other characters referring to Rachel as reckless repeatedly is one of those no-nos in literature, writers are told show don’t tell. But the book does end up showing her recklessness enough throughout the series that I can forgive it for giving children just trying to enjoy a series the equivalent of a big neon sign saying LOOK THIS CHARACTER IS RECKLESS AND LOVES THE DANGER.
Rachel’s character is refreshing for children’s fantasy and sci-fi fiction. Usually, we get some protagonist that is deemed special just because and a lot of the first-person narrative is spent in that character's head fretting over duty, hesitance, and fear. Rachel has very little of that quality, not that she isn’t scared but throughout the series we really do get to see Rachel finding catharsis or even pleasure from danger, plenty of passages even compare it to a drug. So, in Rachel we get a ride through this adventure of someone who when asked to go along for the ride usually responds with an enthusiastic “Hell yeah!” There are few characters in fantasy and sci-fi, adult or children, that I can think of having this quality. One of the ones that comes to mind is actually in another series by Applegate and Grant.
This character is fun. But it also means after scenes where we get to cheer that would be child rapists get their comeuppance by Rachel turning into a half-human half-elephant and scare them half-to-death- we immediately see potential consequences. Rachel gets picked up by one of the high-ranking Human-Controllers, Assistant Principal Chapman. It seems that he didn’t see her morph, he just wanted to make sure the girl who used to be his daughter Melissa’s best friend made it home alright3. But Rachel is understandably spooked, and the rest of Animorphs end up being more worried Rachel might have been seen morphing by a Controller than that she might have just escaped a rapist. The refrain that will be repeated throughout the series “Wow, Rachel is so reckless, she is going to get someone killed one of these days.”
The main story in this book ends up revolving around Assistant Principal Chapman and his family. We find out his daughter Melissa and Rachel used to be best friends but grew apart. As an adult, this is normal. Friendships drift apart for a bunch of reasons. As a kid though, friendships are mostly new, and the idea of a strong friendship with someone you still see regularly drifting apart seems like a bigger deal. Rachel suggests spying on Chapman partly to try and get closer to Melissa again. She morphs her cat a couple of nights and finds a broken family.
Melissa’s mom and dad have both surrendered to the Yeerks with the promise that their daughter would remain free. Yet, while the Yeerks can act as if they are the people they inhabit, they do a bad job of showing any love to the Chapmans’ daughter. Which results in a heartbreaking scene the first time Rachel morphs as Melissa’s pet cat Fluffer.
“I’ll come up and check on you before you turn in sweetheart,” Mr. Chapman said.
The words were normal enough. I guess my own mom or dad could have said exactly the same thing to me. “Dear.” Sweetheart.” But the way they were said…There was something missing. Humanity. Love. Call it whatever you want. The words were right, but they were completely wrong
Melissa flopped on her face on the bed. She pulled a pillow over the back of her head and just cried
But then she started scratching my neck and behind my ears. I purred a little louder and decided to stay for awhile.
“I don’t know what I’ve done,” Melissa said.It startled me to realize she was talking to me. Did she guess the truth? Did she know I was human?
No. She was just a girl talking to her cat.
“I don’t know what I did,” Melissa repeated. “Tell me, Fluffer McKitty. What did I do?”
“What did I do, Fluffer?” she asked again. Why don’t they love me anymore?”
I felt like my own heart would break right then. Because I knew now why Melissa had stopped hanging out with me. I knew why she had become more withdrawn. And I knew how little hope there was for her.
Rachel is reckless. She doesn’t need a justification for fighting in this war the way Jake needs to save his brother. But she is given one here, nonetheless. She sees this heartbreaking story and has a newfound hatred and fire in her. She imagines the story replaying all over the world if the Yeerks take over starting with the adults.
So Rachel goes back for a second night of spying on Assistant Principal Chapman, insisting to the rest of the team that she thinks there is more information to be gained. What she doesn’t tell them, and what I conveniently left out, is that Visser Three ordered the cat killed on her first time as The Visitor4 in Chapman’s house when he was on a call. But of course, this time Rachel really is caught as a cat resulting in the climax of the book as Rachel looks like her time in this series might come to a sudden and abrupt end.
But as I said, this book is non-essential. Everyone gets out ok to fight another day. And we have our second answer to “What is it that is worth fighting for?” In this case, Rachel’s answer is the love of parents for their children. And you know what? I can’t help but think that is pretty compelling.
Especially some of the later ones in the series, we’ll get there
Minor bit of Animorph trivia, the etymology of nothlit is fascinating. It is a portmanteau of the word “nothing” to refer not just to not being able to morph anymore but also the eventual emptying out of your original soul as over the course of the life of the animal you become you will slowly lose a sense of your original self. And the word lit - not in the colloquial way it is used by kids these days, as in “that’s lit fam” but as in backlit, twilit, you know having to do with lighting. So that nothingness or emptying is being illuminated - Ok, I’m lying, the word nothlit is an anagram of Hilton, Applegate needed a fake word while staying at a hotel so she took the letters and jiggled them around a bit until something worked. But wouldn’t it be cool if there was some deep lore behind it? The word sounds pretty cool!
Or at least he acts like that, but the Yeerk probably doesn’t care he just knows this is how Chapman would act.
Hey that’s the name of the book!