Daphnes, any chance I know you from the ZU forums?
I was glancing through book 53 earlier and I noticed that Jake told General Doubleday that he'd only be sending a dozen or so auxiliaries with them to the battle with the Pool Ship. Shouldn't there have been survivors, then?
Anyways, I loved mostly everything about the ending. I don't think the Crayak/Ellimist thing is at all necessary, even though others here like it. We know that those two forces are at work; we don't need a reminder, really. And it's much more true to the spirit of the series to end with the Animorphs making perhaps the greatest of their many death-defying stunts, rather than showing a conversation between those cosmic forces. I also liked how Crayak's last appearance involved him cursing Rachel and the Ellimist's last appearance was his conversation with Rachel as she died.
I think KA needed to kill off Tom. It would have seemed a little cheap and unrealistic if both Tom and Marco's mom were saved in the end, given how much emotional investment there was in those storylines from the beginning and how impossible Jake and Marco's hopes often seemed. And if Tom had survived and been freed, KA would have had to awkwardly introduce a character in the final book, in a scene that would most likely come across as soft. There has to be a cost. Eva's freedom, after all, came at the expense of Nora.
Book 53 is brilliant as it is, I wouldn't want there to have been any significant changes to it. It's chilling when Jake says how he knows beyond any doubt that at least one person he loved would die. I definitely wanted to read a story with that sort of weight to it, not one that takes the easy way out and thus feels soft and unrealistic. Animorphs always had that weight to it, right from the beginning with the death of Elfangor and the casualty of Tobias. And the Chronicles never ever tied things up nicely with a bow. The ending as it was was appropriate to the dark, often tragic story we'd been following for years.
