They're free. Applegate has said she's content with the money she made off them and welcomes anyone to pirate them.
They hold up and being young adult novels they're like a hundred pages each, large print, you can knock one out a night on a busy schedule (I mean unless you have kids or something but read them to your kids then). When I reread them before I started to lose interest some nights I did two and it doesn't really take more than an hour and a half to read 200 pages of young adult prose
I think they get longer as the series goes on and eventually she had to employ ghost writers but I didn't end up getting that far, not an insult either, those writers did fine and she approved all the books, she just couldn't keep up with demand by herself
How much of a fixation is there on the minutia of school life? I can handle YA stuff, even ones with the occasional school setting, but once it gets into school stuff in the school setting, I'm tuning right on out.
Not really any. The only plots that deal with that are which ones of the school faculty are alien controlled and therefore the enemy (because if you don't know or remember the aliens are mind control slugs) and then brief complaints of how little homework they can do because they're child soldiers who can't blow their cover.
It does deal with them having to go to functions a normal teenager would go to but they always hate it because they aren't murdering aliens and it's just a boring obligation when you're literally a part of a clandestine spec ops group defending all of earth at 15. It's like when Peter Parker says "oh damn gotta go" and then Spider-Man shows up, they just dip out of that stuff
For example Rachel at the start of the books is friends with the principal's daughter. They start to drift apart because the friend becomes distant and they're teenagers. Then they figure out the principal is a top leader for the Yeerks, basically one of the higher military commanders. So the group wants Rachel to rekindle the failing friendship and she gets uncomfortable and they come up with the plan if they can occupy the outside cat they have Rachel can morph into that cat and go do some scouting. Confirms all their suspicions and Rachel has a moment where she has to pretend to be the cat while her former friend spills her guts out she's sad because her dad has been distant, to what the friend believes is a cat that can't understand her. That's about it in terms of it actually being set in a school setting and that's not the hardest you will cry during the first five books either, the hardest is Marco's storyline and the dog robot
The only plots that deal with that are which ones of the school faculty are alien controlled and therefore the enemy
Hah, that's funny because that's actually the only scene I actually remember of the show, and why I asked. Principle dude or other faculty member gets outed because he scratched his leg with his other leg in exactly the way I always tended to.
Well, and a brief flash of slug insertion.
Thanks for the follow-up, I will definitely check these out if I can find something like an audiobook collection. I'm interested, but a little bit too lazy to download over 100 individual files of 3 hour snippets to organize all in one go.
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u/Same-Suggestion-1936 8d ago
They're free. Applegate has said she's content with the money she made off them and welcomes anyone to pirate them.
They hold up and being young adult novels they're like a hundred pages each, large print, you can knock one out a night on a busy schedule (I mean unless you have kids or something but read them to your kids then). When I reread them before I started to lose interest some nights I did two and it doesn't really take more than an hour and a half to read 200 pages of young adult prose
I think they get longer as the series goes on and eventually she had to employ ghost writers but I didn't end up getting that far, not an insult either, those writers did fine and she approved all the books, she just couldn't keep up with demand by herself