Books like The Sickness

My my my.Cassie books can be the best in the series, if they're allowed to be. Of all the Animorphs, Cassie is the one most conflicted by the fight against the Yeerks. She is not simply a whiny moralist, as many readers (and Marco) like to suggest. Yes, she can be annoying; yes, sometimes her actions are wrong, even though they are always guided by the best of intentions. But Cassie is the one Animorph who possesses not just human empathy, but interspecies empathy -- that warmth and tenderness towards animals holds her back at times, but that same mindset allows her to relate to sentient aliens, including the Yeerks. Especially the Yeerks.Let's go back to the The Departure. If we define a hero as someone who stands up for her principles, no matter the cost, then Cassie is perhaps the quintessential human hero of the Animorphs universe. She sacrificed her freedom to save the life of a little girl, but more than that, she sacrificed her body, her senses, her life and everything she knew, in order to show a Yeerk, one of the Enemy, that peace was possible, that understanding was attainable. Yes, one could easily make the argument that this was an immensely foolish decision; she risked the entire human race on a gamble. Perhaps this was arrogance on Cassie's part, as she trusted her intuition more than her rationality. (Though -- and this is a separate discussion -- Cassie's intuition is almost always correct.) I won't deny she is a deeply flawed person in this regard, but the fact remains that she gave herself up for her beliefs, and for the destiny of two strangers, one a mere alien slug. If that's not love, if that's not bravery, then I don't know what is.So Cassie's compassion sowed seeds in The Departure, and here the flowers begin to poke their heads out of the soil. (They bloom later in the series.) The Yeerk Peace Movement is beginning to thrive, but Aftran, the Yeerk Cassie made her deal with earlier, is a hostage, and Visser Three is going to torture her until she gives up everything she knows about the Animorphs. All will be lost if she is not rescued. To make matters worse, Ax has contracted a potentially lethal illness, and will literally need brain surgery. I think few Animorphs books have raised the stakes as much as this one.Unfortunately, Cassie transcends "hero" in this book and becomes Wonder Woman. Honestly, she accomplishes everything on her own and escapes with hardly a scratch. It's great to have dangerous situations for the Animorphs to wriggle their way out of -- I especially liked the part of the book where they traverse the water pipes; this was genuinely suspenseful -- but one has to marvel at the luck these kids possess. My annoyance aside, the unreality of it all doesn't hurt the book too much. The plot with Mr. Tidwell and Aftran more than make up for it. Aftran's ultimate destiny is perfect, and foreshadows the Final Solution to the Yeerk problem.I believe there's a lot of beauty in Cassie that goes unrecognized, because it's cool to be unflinchingly cynical. "Principles" are for the naive, yes? You gotta do what you gotta do, no matter the cost, right?Well -- is it true?