On the ghost-written books...

[Chad32]

Cassie is the kind of person that tries to break away from things if she has problems instead of coping. She tries to leave the war at one point, and distances herself from her best friend and the closest thing she has to a boyfriend.

[Gafrash]

I thought in #32:The Separation this 2-dimension-ness to Rachel got highlighted the most, even in the writing. I think as the series progressed, Rachel required more beligent writing, that I could only see KA doing.
And not just that, the stories and the plots themselves, too.
It's almost like KA sent a basic plot and left it up to the ghostwriters to tell it in their own way. Only they didn't quite get the charactrer 'voices' right.

[JFalcon]

I don't remember which book but I recall eventually I did notice that the opening dedications were thanking people for their help in the script and I eventually got to resent those people because they were hurting, not helping, I thought they were giving K.A. bad ideas in these scripts they were helping with because on the whole the plots for those books weren't always very good.

Still I didn't know at the time that a ghost writer was anything more than an old TV show that I used to watch as a kid until it magically vanished like all my other favorite shows at the time tended to do. But I did know there was a difference in quality and feel of a book that just thanked Michael and Jake and a book that thanked John Doe or Jane Smith for their help with the manuscript.

Also I agree that Rachel's image as a blood thirsty psychopathic soldier was mostly how her team precieved her and how she felt they needed her to present herself but I'm not so sure it was a fault of the ghost writers and that K.A. wouldn't have done the same thing anyway. Maybe the ghost writers didn't do it well, it's probably because few of them wrote more than one book and might not have read the series, writing them off as kid's books and so only understood the characters through the notes K.A. had given them.

[Aluminator (Kit)]

I had no idea the books were ghostwritten when I first read the series- I still remember the pang of resentment I felt upon finding that out years later. I basically lost interest in the series after about book 30, though. Everything felt like kind of a slog after that, right up until the end. Also, it felt like Rachel lost her freakin' mind. And her... Rachel-ness. She's got to be a very tough character to portray, Terenia, I totally agree there. She was never really portrayed right after... probably the David trilogy in my mind, even when written by KAA. To me, it kind of feels like book 23 was where the entity known as KAA started to lose interest in this series. Reading them now, there are a few excellent ghostwritten books, but they're too few to alleviate the overall impression. I hate to say it, but I almost wish they'd ended the series quite a bit earlier.