In every book the heroic “Animorphs” (kids who could turn into animals) would acquire a new “morph” (or animal to turn into), allowing them to solve the problem of the day that usually involved the alien Yeerks who were trying to take over the planet. “Animorphs” was a kids series through and through for much of its run. While it could be a mighty coincidence, after reading the end I’m left to assume some adult somewhere decided this was too much for kids and removed it from the library. You see, it turns out there was a reason why my children’s library didn’t have the final book in this children’s series. How little did I know what was awaiting me… I bought the penultimate book as well so I could re-acquaint myself with the story and threw the two 100 pagers in my backpack for the flight home. Memories flooding back to me, I decided it was long overdue that I found out how the whole thing wrapped up. Lo and behold, while casually looking through the shelves, I stumbled across the entirety of the Animorphs series, including that elusive final chapter. While there, we went to a used bookstore in the city. This past summer I while I was interning in LA, I took a weekend trip to Portland, Oregon to visit some old camp friends I hadn’t seen in years. And while I certainly wondered how the whole thing was supposed to end, this small mystery, along with most of my memories and feelings about Animorphs in general, faded into the dark recesses of my mind, packaged away with memories of the playground and kindergarten. While kids are certainly curious individuals, they don’t quite have the attention span of adults. The final book in the series, number 54 “The Beginning,” was nowhere to be found. Our library had almost every one of them, books 1-53 and a plethora of spinoffs.

With each cover showing a kid turning into an animal and the scary blurbs on the back warning of an impending alien invasion, those books were basically crying out to be read by sci-fi-minded children.

The beginning animorphs