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The book The Familiar, by K.A. Applegate was a book that turned my head, K.A.'s books just keep getting better adn better. It all started after a battle, Jake was tired of fighting, tired of making the calls. when he goes to bed, he wakes up the next mornig, only something's wrong... the Yeerks have taken over Earth! and he's 25! Somehow Jake has been pushed forward in time, into a world where he has few allys, and has no idea what's going on. Will Jake return to his rightful time? will he even survive this misfortune? The Familiar keeps you on the edge of your seat, and when it's over, the reader is forced to stop and think... These books (the Animorph series)are both fun to read and full of morals and press the idea that there is no good or evil, black and white, just shades of grey. I would definately recomend this book to anyone who has ever been touched by the struggles of right and wrong.

I think Applegate took a risk with this book. We get to know Jake as he will be ten years in the future, and so the book reveals to us that in the present he is around FIFTEEN years old, so that is KA's first slip-up with the confidentiality on their descriptions. But the real problems with this book was that because the future is so alien to us, and in New York, you would expect some help in visualizing it. But that help is hard to find.

Sure, Applegate gives us a lot of description, but that takes away from everything else, and by the end of the book we are still confused with how things are supposed to look like, how the things in the new world look like, and how the new society operates. It's graphic in the sense of basic character actions, like the fight with the Taxxons underground, but everything else is really confusing. Plus, we get to see all of the other Animorphs again except Ax, so that means the author didn't do a good job at twisting the story well enough for a cameo for him. And then the end is confusing, and it just leaves the fans screaming wondering what choice had he gone with. And why did Jake go through this situation in the first place? The book says it had to do with Cassie, but something like this in the series most-certainly suggests that it is a warning for an upcoming event in the series. What that is is unmentioned, but the book does poorly following Megamorphs #4.

Jake needs to pick up on the storylines, and fast!

Jake seems to have grown up overnight - literally. He goes to bed as his usual kid-self and wakes up ten years older to find the world completely taken over by Yeerks. All the other Animorphs are either dead or Yeerk-infested, and Jake alone is left to fight. Is it all just a horrific dream, or has the Yeerk invasion truly succeeded?