Not bad! Liked it.

The writing style of this book was too punchy, almost made me think it was authored by a man.
Some anachronisms like the word Yes! in the text and single-word sentences in the narration contributed to that impression.

All in all, the plot itself was pretty insane and high-octane, more like an Andy Remic book than a Young Adult novel in the Animorphs series. My one complaint is that I would have liked the involvement of the building that proves important to be made part of the plot before it is just randomly supplied by Tobias when asked (Applegate normally does a great job of introducing such elements early in the story to make their eventual utility to the gang more understandable and sensible to the reader).

Were the whole series written in this style by this author (Elise Smith, ghostwriter), we would lose significant character development of Applegate, but would gain in some of the action-packed plots she is capable of giving us.

On an amusing note, Visser Three morphs in this book into an "Unnamed putrid flesh creature," according to Wikipedia. ( )

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Jake is absent so the team decides to put Rachel in charge when a report comes in of discovering the Visser's secret feeding spot. They can't pass up the opportunity to try and get the enemy. Rachel is all for just trying to chase him down (using a new cheetah morph) but of course they fail. Also meet a new alien creature, the only good thing here being that the Visser and this new enemy the Inspector appear to despise each other, which is to the Animorphs' advantage. Then they decide to rush around town storming different shops and locations one after the other making it appear that they have much larger numbers than in reality, so the Visser will look bad in front of the Inspector. Causing a lot of conspicuous damage and probably hurting innocent people (not like them at all). Then to bash in on a meeting of high-up Controllers, all of them using polar bear form instead of their usual battle morphs. It goes badly. Cassie gets captured and almost forced into the Yeerk pool. The others barely save her in time- using bird of prey morphs and one cobra. They pretty much only escape because when Marco-as-cobra takes the Inspector down, the Visser and all his underlings just stand there staring, instead of grabbing the Animorphs who are exhausted and injured. All these frenetic attacks without much planning were Rachel's push, but she has doubts the whole time and feels terrible about putting her friends in danger and afterwards when Jake returns asks him: how do you do it? how can you stand to make those decisions, putting your friends' lives on the line? He flinches for a moment then closes it off and says: I just don't think about it. Well, I could have done without all the hectic nonsense fighting scenes, but the ending had a more serious note.

from the Dogear Diary ( )

I liked kick ass Rachel learning that going in fighting isn't always the best plan. ( )