This book was a bit of an oddball for me. I tend to really, really like Tobias-narrated books, but this is probably my least favorite of the bunch. Not that it's outright bad, and I really tried to like it the way I liked his other books, but there were quite a few flaws that needed to be ironed out before this one hit the shelves. I feel that Taylor's character had changed a lot more than she really should have in the time between the events of book 33 and this one, and there was a lot of promise when Tobias was shown morphing a Taxxon on the cover, which turned out to be not all that interesting. To get to my main point, though, this book should have been a huge moment for Tobias, since he's finally coming face-to-face with the Controller who had literally kept him in a room for over two hours and nearly killed him, but he really comes out of this book unchanged in the end. Let's take a look at all the previous Tobias books; #3 has him coming to terms with his new role in nature and in the Animorphs' group dynamic, #13 has him regain his morphing power, in #23 he realizes that Elfangor is his father and has a ton of the delicious trauma that I love so much, and of course, #33 is the book where he's tortured for hours on end, has a near-death experience, and is obviously horribly shaken up by all of this. But with this book, he walks away essentially the same as he came in, which for a character that so rarely gets a chance to narrate a book, is really disappointing. Really, that's how I see this book as a whole, as a massive missed opportunity.
