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kstericker's review
adventurous
emotional
sad
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
Content Warnings
Graphic: Animal cruelty, Body horror, Violence, Death, War, Panic attacks/disorders, and Injury/Injury detail
Moderate: Confinement, Animal death, Gun violence, and Murder
ramiel's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
emotional
reflective
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
This book is one of the biggest mood whiplashes of my life. When I first started it, I had forgotten That Scene That Traumatized Child Me and thought "oh, this is the skunk one? I guess its time for something lighter"... and then they mentioned the termites. It's kind of jarring, actually. I rate it lower than most purely for the ending alone, which is nonsensical even by children's book standards, but a lot of the meat of the story has some great Cassie development.
Anyway.
Nature at its finest. Cute, cuddly animals who slaughtered to live. The color of nature wasn't green. It was red. Blood red.
This book also has one of my favorite quotes as well, one that I just associate heavily with the series in general. Cassie always thinks deeply about her morality, how far she should go, what's right and what's wrong. Cassie also always thinks about nature, her first book showing that her drive to fight came from her desire to protect Earth's ecosystems from the yeerks' "salt the Earth" strategy after conquest. In this book, she's forced to realize the conflict in her own personal belief system. "What is right and what is wrong?" What is the difference between we, humans (omnivores), killing animals to live and yeerks (parasites) infesting other species to live? This becomes a bigger theme as Cassie's books go on, so its fun to look back and see how the seeds were sown.
warnings for animal / insect death
I'm going to chop this book in two parts. That is: Cassie's development and... this book's central external conflict.
tl;dr Visser 3 is deforesting the woods looking for andalites but some nature board of review or whatever stops him, so he decides to make the last voter a controller. Yet, somehow Visser 3 completely gives up his plan of infesting a pretty decent host body and cutting down a forest because he got sprayed by a skunk. Because Ax made him promise he wouldn't if they told Visser 3 how to get rid of the smell. Somehow, this worked. I'll give that the rest of the book was so heavy in character development that once it came time to solve the external plot, they had no idea what to do. Or maybe they did and it was for the humor.
I will say, the bit where the human controller literally tries to tell Visser 3 they can get the smell out and he chooses to listen to Ax instead was hilariously in character, even if the rest of the way his plot ended wasn't.
Anyway, Cassie.
One minor callback I enjoyed, that kicked off Cassie's major trauma point in this book, was Jake always trying to give Cassie an out of whatever plan they have. Which, in turn, infuriates her and makes her feel like her friends think she's weak, and drives her into doing it anyway. This leads to an absolutely horrific scene where the kids turn into termites and literally lose their sense of self. In this book, the queen termite controls the hive mind of the rest, and it's written like mind control or possession. The kids, even after remembering who they are, cannot control their bodies, and they realize the only way out is to somehow kill the queen. Cassie, probably due to her natural talent in morphing (?) manages to manipulate her termite mind into seeing the queen as an enemy, and: "I hadn't just destroyed her. I had destroyed the entire colony. I had done it to save myself and my friends."
From here, Cassie spirals.
She's the peaceful one, the one who loathes and avoids violence. The healer, the one who tends to nature. And now she's being shown how violent nature can really be, and she literally says "I had killed a bug, and for some reason, that had shaken my deepest faith". She gets angry at Tobias for killing and eating a skunk kit from a litter she wanted to save, she lashes out at Jake telling him "the strong eat the weak" and maybe its time for humans to lose. Later, she apologizes to Tobias, but they have a discussion about "right and wrong" in terms of nature, something that has no solid, clear answer. It's the question she's left with, and the one she spends the whole war trying to figure out. She also starts to question how they treat non-human controllers (realizing that they killed non-human controllers mercilessly, while trying to protect their own). This, of course, carries on in her development in further books, continuing to build on the framework and foundation of "Cassie" that we were first introduced to.
It's the death of a bug that "shakes her deepest faith", and in doing so I think it paves the way for Cassie what's yet to come. If she can feel this level of guilt and remorse towards the death of a termite, then certainly she would be the one to try and reach out for peace with sentient slugs.
I don't think it's a coincidence that the way the description of the termite colony's hive mind was very similar to the descriptions of how yeerks possess their own hosts, after all.
Or, you know, maybe it is and I'm reaching a little.
(Shout out to Sisi Aisha Johnson for being a great Cassie voice actor, ftr.)
warnings for animal / insect death
tl;dr Visser 3 is deforesting the woods looking for andalites but some nature board of review or whatever stops him, so he decides to make the last voter a controller. Yet, somehow Visser 3 completely gives up his plan of infesting a pretty decent host body and cutting down a forest because he got sprayed by a skunk. Because Ax made him promise he wouldn't if they told Visser 3 how to get rid of the smell. Somehow, this worked. I'll give that the rest of the book was so heavy in character development that once it came time to solve the external plot, they had no idea what to do. Or maybe they did and it was for the humor.
I will say, the bit where the human controller literally tries to tell Visser 3 they can get the smell out and he chooses to listen to Ax instead was hilariously in character, even if the rest of the way his plot ended wasn't.
Anyway, Cassie.
One minor callback I enjoyed, that kicked off Cassie's major trauma point in this book, was Jake always trying to give Cassie an out of whatever plan they have. Which, in turn, infuriates her and makes her feel like her friends think she's weak, and drives her into doing it anyway. This leads to an absolutely horrific scene where the kids turn into termites and literally lose their sense of self. In this book, the queen termite controls the hive mind of the rest, and it's written like mind control or possession. The kids, even after remembering who they are, cannot control their bodies, and they realize the only way out is to somehow kill the queen. Cassie, probably due to her natural talent in morphing (?) manages to manipulate her termite mind into seeing the queen as an enemy, and: "I hadn't just destroyed her. I had destroyed the entire colony. I had done it to save myself and my friends."
From here, Cassie spirals.
She's the peaceful one, the one who loathes and avoids violence. The healer, the one who tends to nature. And now she's being shown how violent nature can really be, and she literally says "I had killed a bug, and for some reason, that had shaken my deepest faith". She gets angry at Tobias for killing and eating a skunk kit from a litter she wanted to save, she lashes out at Jake telling him "the strong eat the weak" and maybe its time for humans to lose. Later, she apologizes to Tobias, but they have a discussion about "right and wrong" in terms of nature, something that has no solid, clear answer. It's the question she's left with, and the one she spends the whole war trying to figure out. She also starts to question how they treat non-human controllers (realizing that they killed non-human controllers mercilessly, while trying to protect their own). This, of course, carries on in her development in further books, continuing to build on the framework and foundation of "Cassie" that we were first introduced to.
It's the death of a bug that "shakes her deepest faith", and in doing so I think it paves the way for Cassie what's yet to come. If she can feel this level of guilt and remorse towards the death of a termite, then certainly she would be the one to try and reach out for peace with sentient slugs.
I don't think it's a coincidence that the way the description of the termite colony's hive mind was very similar to the descriptions of how yeerks possess their own hosts, after all.
Or, you know, maybe it is and I'm reaching a little.
(Shout out to Sisi Aisha Johnson for being a great Cassie voice actor, ftr.)
Content Warnings
Graphic: Animal death, Body horror, Confinement, Grief, Murder, Panic attacks/disorders, and Slavery
Moderate: Animal cruelty, Death, Gore, Violence, and War
Once again, the trauma of being in a hive mind insect.
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