The plot wasn’t a bad one.
It’s not exactly original, yes, but it was a good device to give us a bit more depth to Rachel’s character. The split personality, along with the two identical bodies is illustrative to what’s been happening inside the character.
It may not be her best book, but I liked it because, here both the readers and the other Ani-characters get to psycho-analyze her. Thus far, the others have this sense that Rachel is this bold warrior, who even Cryak seems to be taking some sort of an interest in lately. As readers, we know better, because of the way she started. Rachel's early books portrayed a more easygoing carefree friendly young girl, who's fighting for her friends and family (think of scenes like her getting padded by Melissa Chapman, her nurturing her sisters with the Saddler incident, dragging Cassie around the mall, etc...). We don't get that anymore at this stage of the series.
But Rachel is not different from the others in her conflicts, in her struggling inner contradictions since this war. And I think this book succeeds in showing that.
This book also points to what is going to happen to her ahead.
I didn't really like this book much, since it just seemed so... wonky. Canon was bent (Really? Erek electrocuting her?), it was very gimmicky (though often suggested by readers, so I guess it was just KAA giving in), and overall just not that interesting. Lots of insight into Rachel's mind, but not enough to make me like the book....
But I would go with ‘wonky’ to describe the way it Rachel was written, too. But it’s not as bad as how she’ll be written in
#37: The Weakness.
1. How do you think KA handled the two halves of Rachel? You have a Nice Rachel with a sense of duty, no short-term memory and absolutely no courage, and you have a Mean Rachel who has no long-term planning ability and is basically bloodthirsty and insane. Do you think that it was a good representation of the true Rachel? What would you have changed?
3. The Animorphs can't stand either Mean or Nice Rachel, but they obviously like/love normal Rachel. How much of Rachel's personality shows through as Mean Rachel, and how much as Nice Rachel?
Yet again Rachel is the one who wades into some morphing issue. From her morphing allergy to crocs, to this one.
To me, it was predictable to be given these two good and bad halves of Rachel. The reason I say good and bad, is b/c 'nice-Rachel' seemed to get all the 'nice' aspects of Rachel. In the beginning you like her and feel sorry for her, then you just get annoyed with this ditsy portrayal of her. "Like, like, like…" Arrrrrgh!!!!
And THEN you learn of this business of Rachel to devotion to duty (?!?!?!).
Short-spanned-Aggressive Rachel got tagged Mean Rachel, who acted like a bold and ignorant human-bomb. Who as bad and confronting as she was, we learn that she was the one who kept protected and dealt with the changes they were faced in the war.
I liked the indepth predictability. But personally, I would have made 'nice-Rachel' more of a 'conventional-Rachel' than the ditsy blonde stereotype, b/c, indeed, as I think
JFalcon stated, Rachel was NEVER portrayed that way. And 'mean-Rachel', I would have made her more of a 'bold-Rachel'; a Rachel that, yes, was still aggressive and battle-gungho, but not the ignorant-bloodthirsty way she was portrayed. Rachel NEVER came across as an ignorant bully throughout the series, really.
2. Obviously the mechanics behind this book are a bit...off. But for any of you Ani-science geeks out there who like to figure out how stuff works the way it does: why do you think that the morphing technology allowed for the possibilities of two Rachel's? And why do you think that it split her into two separate personalities?
The electric-energy-acquiring-combining solution seemed a bit ‘slack’ way to end for me, too. But mostly because of the inconsistency with the Chee’s stepback-programming.
This book was Ghost-written, right?!
Rachel's brain was still in Zero Space, the first Rahcel to morph should have gotten everything, mean and nice sides, the second, assumi tere was enough of it left to morph, should have morphed a perfect rather than so terribly flawed clone of Rachel, or else just been a star fish without any concious mind because Rachel's would have gone with her body. However that's less fun than thinking of a nonsense way for this to work so . . .
Andalite scientists wanted to be able to clone warriors on the battlefield to make up for losses and help overwhelm the enemy so they put in a mechanic to allow a morph to spawn a second andalite if a portion of it was cut away but still capable of thinking and demorphing, but they never got it right and kept getting groups of warriors who made suicidal charges and a second group of warriors who just ran away screaming with the whole "step one, evade the cannons, step two ? ? ? ? step three, victory!" mentality.
The suicidal group might have known the second step but none of them were surviving to tell, so the Andalite scientists begrudgingly developed a proceedure to reverse the process...
Huahauhauahuahuahuahauhauh!!!!
JFalcon, you got the mind for this, mate!
4. Just for fun: if you were split into two halves,severing your personality into its two extremes, what would they be like?
I think human beings are too complex to be split into ‘clichéd’ (to call it that) personas. The parts of me that are struggling at the moment are indecisions-fear-of-future-uncertainties X safety-in-the-past-resist-change… But that doesn’t
really sound like it embodies two parts of my person.
I rather ponder on what type of personas the other Anis would get under the same incident.
5. Anything else? Questions? Comments? Favorite quotes?
I really liked the scene with that big girl bullying ‘nice’ Rachel, and getting owned by the ‘mean’ Rachel. Two interesting things happening there. On one hand it says that Rachel is as susceptible to push a shove as much as any others her age, and that she's always counted on her ‘mean’ streak to be the resistant and tough person she is. But detrimentally, if I recall, mean-Rachel actually liked the bully girl in a way. Which says something about this particular aggressive nature of Rachel.
On a different note, this book can also be considered to be a prelude to the next one, due to the imminent threat of the Anti-Morphing ray prototype.
Visser Three’s people seemed to once again come up with an ingenious plan to take down the ‘bandits’. My question is, if Jake and the split-Rachels didn’t get the right truck/van, why didn’t the others who followed the other two vehicles?!
PS: And if I can join the 'congratulations' bandwagon:
CONGRATS, TERENIA!!!
