Dave's Animorphs Rant: Megamorphs Book #2: In The Time Of Dinosaurs In light of all the hullabaloo about the Transformers Animorphs toy line, and how "it's based off a kiddie book, it's gonna suck and drag down the intelligence level of the line!" I decided to snag one of the books and see for myself. The Megamorphs book seemed a good choice, being thicker than the usual installments and thus hopefully giving a better shot at a single-book read. Took me a little over two hours to read the 230 pages (I was watching TV too). At the end of this, I did not feel like I'd wasted my time or money. To be frank, there's a lot of formula writing in this book, and it suffers from a common problem of serialized stories: insufficient introduction of the characters. The majority of the readers have read other Animorphs books, so Applegate doesn't want to bore them with lengthy descriptions of the main characters, but she goes too far the other way. I was almost to the end of the book before I had a solid grasp on the six characters (I thought Jake was an alien for about half the book, and he's not). There were several places where a single sentence could have made a LOT of difference without seeming like clunky Budiansky-style exposition. For instance, when Marco first mentions the perils of staying in an animal form too long, he should have said something about Tobias, who got stuck in bird form in one of the previous books. Took me a few chapters to realize Tobias was a former human, and not just a bird who had been augmented with the morphing powers. However, once you do get all the information, it's a surprisingly well balanced cast. You have a classic Tetrad going, with Leader (Jake), Warrior (Rachel), Jester (Marco) and Shaman (Carrie), plus two variations on the concept of the Outsider (Tobias and the alien Ax). They do all veer into caricature territory once in a while, but strong personalities help keep them separate in the reader's mind. The story also got to show several of the characters acting differently in the new situation (of being 65 million years in the past), although I think as a result we may not have really gotten to see the "baseline" personality for Tobias. The plot, while using a number of handwaves and twists to keep going, was pretty strong, and led up to one of the characters having to decide whether to be an accomplice to genocide (a point which got glossed over a little quickly for my tastes, but which was probably covered about right for a Young Adult book). Some of it was telegraphed (as soon as you know they need a big explosion to get back to the present, anyone who paid attention in school will know that the comet sighted early in the story is gonna hit one way or another), but it was engaging enough that I ended up staying up rather later than I had intended rather than put it down and finish it the next day. Granted, this is just one book, and Applegate may do a better job when she can flex her muscles with a longer book. But it was pretty good, even without making excuses for the target audience of high-school kids (trust me, this is aimed at about the 13-16 year old demographic, NOT the 3-7 group as some people have claimed). I have no fear of Animorphs "dumbing down" the Transformers line now that I've read one of the books. Dave Van Domelen, "There was nothing [in my repertoire of animal modes] that could stand against a Tyrannosaurus rex. Nothing! My gorilla morph? The Tyrannosaurus would eat it in two bites." - Marco possibly criticizing the BW Season 1 opener....