A review by juushika
Elfangor's Secret by K.A. Applegate

2.0

Time travel is hard to pull off, and this doesn't manage it. There's no stakes, because the reader can assume status quo will resume (and it does, too much: Crayak is still owed a for-real life) and "what does it mean to rewrite history?" is perhaps too broad an issue for a 200-page MG book. Animorphs frequently tackles these overlarge, impossible questions, and is content to leave them unanswered--and that approach almost works here, in the unresolved questions about the nature of evil and the evils of history. But it falls apart when determining which events created history as we know it, and whether we live in the good timeline; in short, "America, F* Yeah!" is weird as hell to read in 2019, especially given the intents of this series and the fact that this is the book which reveals Jake and Rachel are patrilineal Jews. That reveal is the best takeaway; also Rachel and Tobais's first kiss, also the sense of grief and loss at apparent deaths, which is better rendered here than in In the Time of Dinosaurs (Megamorphs 2) or, perhaps, anywhere so far in the series. But this just didn't work for me, both in overarching tone and in niggling details like the research-dumping of how a flintlock works.