Remembering The Sickness by K.A. Applegate

This post is going to be starting off a new review series, separate from my main series of reviews. These will be just as lazy -- probably lazier, even -- as my usual reviews. According to the data I've put into GoodReads, I've currently got a "Read" count of 945 books. I've only officially reviewed a very small sampling of those and really don't intend on going back and rereading all of them in order to properly review them. So, while I was spraying down meat saws at work, I had this idea to do a series of reviews based solely on what I remember of a random assortment of books and possibly the blurbs. I thought I might also do this style of post for what I'm about to read, just to see how much I remember vs what my rereads turn up. But yeah, mostly these "Remembering" posts will be for books I have little to no intention of rereading. They'll also have no particular order, just what I happen to have my mind on at any given moment. The format will also be open to change at any given moment. I haven't settled on what exactly I want to do with these yet so... yeah. There will be spoilers.

Enjoy.

The Sickness by K.A. Applegate

I was a huge fan of Animorphs when I was in Junior High. Like, HUGE. I am embarrassed  to say that I created a weird form of "Tag" based around the series. That's how big I was into it. I read all 54 books and the surrounding "Mega Morphs" and "Chronicles" extras. I even watched a few episodes of the Nickelodeon TV show when I had access. It seemed fitting to start off this new series of reviews with an Animorphs book, specifically my favorite one: The Sickness. Book number 29.

Every Animorphs book follows a different member of the protagonist group, in this case, Cassie.

I have no idea how The Sickness starts out, only that the Animorphs are on one of their self-assigned missions and Jake, I believe, starts getting sick. Like, throwing up and not being able to stay in his animal forms. I distinctly remember the throwing up bit, because there's a whole part where Cassie and Marco are walking Jake home and Marco starts riffing on all the different names for puking. My adolescent brain loved that bit. Anyway, one by one, each of the Animorphs except Cassie falls prey to whatever this sickness is. There's something about it being passed through the morphing ability, but it's all kind of vague and I'm pretty sure we never find out why Cassie doesn't end up sick.

However, we do find out that Ax, the sole alien of the group, has some brain-swelling or something as a side effect of the sickness and Cassie, as the proto-vet or whatever, has to do some surgery in order to relieve the swelling. This needs to involve a Yeerk for some reason, but to get ahold of one of those, you gotta get to the Yeerk-pool... and that's as much as I remember about that particular plot point until:

Over the course of the book, Cassie also has to befriend a Yeerk (the brain-invading slug-like parasites the Animorphs are fighting the entire series). Or, befriend isn't exactly the word as Cassie makes a deal with this "girl" to basically get herself stuck in an utterly useless morph in return for the Yeerk's help. Cassie does this, I remember, but it's ultimately okay because of a weird quirk in the morphing tech that allows metamorphosed morphs to restart the morphing clock. So apparently a caterpillar turning itself to goo and then becoming a butterfly restarts Cassie's morphing clock and she's back to being a human in the end. Which... ya know, I'm glad I didn't know more about the butterfly life-cycle at the time, because I call shenanigans about that 2-hour-and-you're-stuck clock in that case... but I also don't know how long that whole process actually takes and now I have questions.

But whatever, Cassie does Ax's surgery with the help of the Yeerk "girl," the rest of the Animorphs basically get over the sickness, and everyone comes out all hunky-dory at the end of the book. I think the Yeerk "girl" also lets her host go and gains morphing abilities of her own... and purposefully gets herself stuck as something else, but I could be completely misremembering that. 54+ books of memories, I'm bound to get things mixed up.

I probably reread The Sickness at least five times as a kid. It's probably why I remember so much about it. The Animorphs books were below my reading level even when I was reading them the first time and they're kind of short. I tore through them pretty quickly multiple times. A good chunk of that series is a big blur in my head. That's also fairly understandable as Animorphs is one of those formulaic series mostly written by ghost writers. That said, I highly recommend Animorphs as a series for kids interested in sci-fi but not super sure if they're going to like it or not and animal lovers. Animorphs is more heavy on the animal facts than it is the actual science fiction aspects, from what I remember anyway.