I couldn’t tell you the first book I ever read, but I know exactly what turned me into a reader, and it was Animorphs. I read every one of those books at least half a dozen times.
Thirty years later there are scenes I still turn over. I thinkg about Toomin winning a singing contest against Father — not by singing about joy, but by singing about loneliness and grief. He wins by going toward the sad thing.
Then, the ending. If the prompt is which book’s ending I’d rewrite, that’s the one. It’s disturbing and sad and it refuses to resolve. Rachel is dead. Ax gets assimilated. Jake has turned into an empty person who can’t live with what winning cost him. Tobias loses Rachel and just leaves, goes off to be a hawk in the woods. And the last line is Jake giving the order to ram the enemy ship, and then the book stops. You’re left to assume they all die.
I’ve never liked how that makes me feel. The uncertainty of it. The flat, empty sadness under it, like the whole war added up to nothing anybody got to keep.
So I sat here for a while actually trying to rewrite it. Give Rachel a way out. Let Jake set it down. End on the ship pulling up short instead of driving in.
Every version is worse. Not worse-written — worse in the way that counts. The reason I’m still chewing on this ending thirty years later is that it made me feel bad in a specific, honest way, in a way that a clean ending wouldn’t. I’d have closed the book and forgotten it. The bad feeling is what kept it.
The books had been doing this the whole time, honestly. It looked like a series about kids who turn into animals and fight aliens. It was actually about what war costs you — the killing, and what it does to you to keep killing and still think of yourself as the good guy.
So no. I wouldn’t touch it. I’d pick it as the ending I hate the most and leave it exactly where it is.
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