Animorphs was my series. And rereading it as an adult, I’ve realized something: these books were never really about kids turning into animals. They were about war, and they trusted their young readers to handle it.

So let’s morph back to 1996 and dig in.

What is Animorphs?

Animorphs is a science fiction series written by K.A. Applegate (Katherine Applegate, working with her husband Michael Grant) and published by Scholastic from 1996 to 2001. The main series runs 54 books, with a handful of special editions on the side.

The premise hooks you in the first chapter. Five kids cut through an abandoned construction site one night and witness a crashed alien spaceship. Its pilot, a dying Andalite prince named Elfangor, warns them that Earth is being secretly invaded by the Yeerks: parasitic slugs that crawl into a host’s ear, wrap around the brain and take total control. The Yeerks could be anyone. Your teacher. Your vice principal. Your own brother.

Before he dies, Elfangor gives the kids the one weapon he has: the power to morph into any animal they touch. There’s just one catch. Stay in a morph longer than two hours, and you’re stuck that way forever.

Meet the Animorphs

The books rotate narrators, so each one is told in first person by a different member of the team. That means you get to live inside all of their heads, and you get very attached.

• Jake — the reluctant leader. He never asked to be in charge, and the weight of every decision slowly grinds him down.
• Rachel — gorgeous, fearless and maybe a little too eager for a fight. Her favorite morph is a grizzly bear, which tells you everything.
• Tobias — the lonely kid who gets trapped in a red-tailed hawk morph in the very first book. His story is one of the most bittersweet in the series.
• Cassie — the team’s heart and moral compass. She grew up around animals and is the one always asking whether what they’re doing is right.
• Marco — the jokester, and Jake’s best friend. Underneath the wisecracks, he’s the most ruthlessly practical of them all.
• Ax — Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill, Elfangor’s younger brother, who joins the team in book four. He’s a centaur-like Andalite who becomes obsessed with human food (especially cinnamon buns).

Why it hit so hard

On the surface, Animorphs looks like pure fun: kids turning into dolphins, cockroaches and housecats to sneak around and fight aliens. And it is fun. But Applegate snuck something much heavier underneath.

It was a war story. The Animorphs are child soldiers in a guerrilla war, and the books never pretend otherwise. They get hurt. They lose people. They lie to their families. They make choices that haunt them, and the series lets those choices haunt them for dozens of books.

Nobody was purely good or purely evil. The Andalites, supposedly the good guys, turn out to be arrogant and willing to sacrifice Earth. Some Yeerks are desperate refugees. Cassie spends whole books wrestling with whether it’s ever okay to kill an enemy who might want peace.

Morphing was body horror. Those descriptions of bones cracking, skin sprouting feathers and organs rearranging were genuinely unsettling. And every animal brought its own instincts, so the kids had to fight to stay themselves. Ever imagined being an ant, a tiny cog in a hive with no sense of self? The Animorphs find out firsthand, and it’s some of the most terrifying stuff in middle grade fiction.

For a lot of us, Animorphs was the first time a book treated us like we could handle hard questions. That’s why it stuck.

The covers, the show and the ’90s craze

Let’s talk about those covers. Painted by artist David B. Mattingly, each one showed a character mid-transformation, and the morph sequence continued on the back. They were weird, a little cheesy and instantly recognizable from across a library. They’ve since become a beloved internet meme, which feels right.

The books came out at a breakneck pace, roughly one a month, which meant there was always a new one to look forward to. They sold millions of copies and spun off toys, trading cards and even a live-action TV series on Nickelodeon in 1998 and 1999. The show… let’s just say the special effects budget was not there, and most fans prefer to remember the books.

That ending (mild spoilers ahead)

If you read all the way to book 54, The Beginning, you probably still have feelings about it.

Without giving everything away: the war ends, but not everyone makes it, and the ones who do aren’t okay. The final pages leave the surviving characters scattered, grieving and heading into an uncertain future. There’s no parade. There’s no tidy happy ending.

Many fans were furious in 2001. Applegate responded with a letter to readers explaining that she’d spent 54 books writing about war, and she wasn’t going to pretend at the end that war is fun or that it leaves people unchanged. Two decades later, a lot of those same fans now call it the bravest choice in the series.

Does it hold up?

Mostly, yes. Some of the ’90s details are charmingly dated (the mall! pay phones!), and with ghostwriters handling many of the middle books, the quality wobbles here and there. But the core books are as gripping as I remembered, and the big ideas land even harder as an adult.

Reading it now as a teacher, I’m struck by how much these books respect kids. They’re short, fast and packed with action, which makes them a great fit for reluctant readers. But they also open the door to real conversations:

• What makes someone a hero, and can heroes do bad things?
• Is it ever okay to lie to the people you love to protect them?
• How do you treat an enemy who might also be a victim?
• How does fighting a war change the people who fight it?

That’s a lot of depth hiding behind a kid turning into a gecko.

Where to start today

Whether you’re revisiting the series or handing it to a new reader, there are a few ways in.

The original books. Start with book 1, The Invasion, and read in order. The series builds on itself, and the payoffs are worth it. Used bookstores and library sales are still full of the classic covers.

The graphic novels. Scholastic’s Graphix imprint began adapting the series in October 2020, with cartoonist Chris Grine scripting and illustrating each book in full color. They’re faithful to the originals and a perfect bridge for kids who love comics. (source)

The side stories. Once you’ve finished a chunk of the main series, these fill in the bigger universe:

(My advice? Don’t skip The Andalite Chronicles. Elfangor’s story will wreck you in the best way.)

Your turn

Animorphs taught a whole generation that stories for kids could be funny, weird, terrifying and heartbreaking all at once. Twenty-five-plus years later, I’m still a little bit in awe of what Applegate pulled off.

Now I want to hear from you. Did you read Animorphs growing up? Who was your favorite Animorph, and what animal would you have morphed first? Tell me in the comments.

The nights are getting longer, the leaves are crunching, and there’s no better time to curl up with a book that makes you double-check the locks. These five murder mysteries range from dark academia to classic whodunit, but every one of them has that crackle-of-candlelight, someone-is-lying atmosphere that October was made for.

Grab your coziest sweater. Let’s get suspicious.

1. If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio

If you only pick up one book from this list, make it this one.

Oliver Marks has just been released from prison after ten years, and the detective who put him there wants to finally hear what really happened. So Oliver tells him. The story takes us back to Dellecher Classical Conservatory, where Oliver was one of seven acting students who lived, breathed and performed Shakespeare. Over their final year, the roles they play on stage start bleeding into real life, until one of them ends up dead.

It’s moody, theatrical and achingly sad, full of misty lakes, crumbling castles and friendships that are a little too intense. Rio weaves lines from the plays right into the characters’ conversations, which sounds gimmicky but absolutely works. You don’t need to know your Shakespeare to love it, but if you do, you’ll catch all sorts of delicious foreshadowing.

Read it if you love: dark academia, unreliable narrators, and stories that break your heart a little.

Perfect for: a rainy October weekend when you can read it in two sittings.

2. The Secret History by Donna Tartt

The book that basically invented dark academia, and the natural next read after If We Were Villains.

Richard Papen arrives at a small, elite college in Vermont and falls in with a tight-knit group of classics students who study under a charismatic, mysterious professor. They’re brilliant, wealthy and a little bit dangerous. Here’s the twist: Tartt tells you in the very first pages that the group killed one of their own. The mystery isn’t who did it, it’s how and why a group of friends could get there.

It’s long and slow-burning, but in the best way. The New England autumn atmosphere is so thick you can practically smell the woodsmoke and old books.

Read it if you love: character studies, campus settings, and a creeping sense of dread.

Perfect for: readers who want to sink into one big book all month long.

3. Hallowe’en Party by Agatha Christie

It would feel wrong to make a Halloween list without the Queen of Crime, and she literally wrote one for the occasion.

Mystery novelist Ariadne Oliver is helping out at a children’s Halloween party in an English village when a young girl boasts that she once saw a murder. Nobody takes her seriously, until she’s found dead in the apple-bobbing tub before the night is over. Mrs. Oliver calls in her old friend Hercule Poirot, who discovers that this sleepy village has more than one buried secret.

It’s one of Christie’s later Poirot novels, and it’s a quick, twisty read with plenty of spooky-season flavor: snapdragon games, fortune-telling and all.

Read it if you love: classic whodunits, small-village gossip, and a detective with excellent mustache care.

Perfect for: reading on Halloween night itself, between trick-or-treaters.

4. The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton

Published in the UK as The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, this one is a puzzle box wrapped in a ghost story.

A man wakes up in the woods outside Blackheath, a decaying English country house, with no memory of who he is. He soon learns that Evelyn Hardcastle will be murdered at the party that night, and he’ll relive that same day over and over, waking up in a different guest’s body each time, until he can name her killer.

It’s Groundhog Day meets Agatha Christie, with a gothic, rain-soaked setting and a masked figure lurking around every corner. Keep a notebook handy. You’ll want it.

Read it if you love: mind-bending plots, time loops, and keeping track of clues.

Perfect for: readers who think they’ve seen every mystery trick there is.

5. And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

Yes, two Christies. No, I’m not sorry.

Ten strangers are invited to a mansion on an isolated island off the coast of England. Their host never arrives. Instead, a recorded voice accuses each of them of a past crime, and then the guests start dying one by one, in the same order as an old nursery rhyme framed in every bedroom. With no way off the island, they realize the killer must be one of them.

This is one of the best-selling mysteries of all time, and it still holds up. It’s tense, claustrophobic and genuinely creepy, more horror movie than cozy mystery. If you’ve somehow avoided spoilers all these years, protect that ending at all costs.

Read it if you love: locked-room mysteries, stormy settings, and “trust no one” energy.

Perfect for: a stormy night with every light in the house turned on.

Your turn

Whether you’re in the mood for Shakespearean tragedy, a classic Poirot puzzle or a time-bending country-house nightmare, there’s a murder on this list with your name on it. (Figuratively. Hopefully.)

What’s your favorite mystery to read in October? Tell me in the comments. My to-be-read pile is always hungry for more.

Happy haunting, and happy reading!

But e-readers aren’t cheap, and there are a lot of them. So I dug into what’s out there and narrowed it down to three: the cheapest one, the one I actually use, and the one that does the most. Plus the trick that gets me most of my books for free!

The options at a glance

These are list prices as of October 2026 (source). Sales knock a lot off, so it’s worth waiting for one.

The cheapest: Amazon Kindle
(with a Kobo twist)

The basic Kindle is the cheapest e-reader worth buying, at $109.99. It has a sharp screen and does the one thing it needs to do: let you read. The catch is that price includes ads on the lock screen ($20 more to remove them), and it has no warm light or waterproofing.

Here’s my money-saving twist, though. For $129.99, the same price as an ad-free Kindle, the Kobo Clara BW adds warm light for bedtime reading, waterproofing, and library borrowing built right in. If you plan to use your library (and you should!), that’s the cheap one I’d actually buy.

Want to spend even less? Both brands sell certified refurbished readers, and big sales like Black Friday regularly drop prices.

The one I use: Kobo Libra

My everyday reader is a Kobo Libra, and I love it. It has physical page-turn buttons (a must for reading one-handed), it’s waterproof enough for the bath, and the warm light is easy on tired end-of-school-day eyes. The current model, the Libra Colour, lists at $219.99.

It costs more than the cheap picks, but the bigger 7-inch screen and those buttons make it the one I reach for every single night. And because Kobo has library borrowing built in, it’s paid for itself many times over in books I didn’t have to buy.

The most versatile: Boox Go Color 7

If you want one device that does a little of everything, look at Boox. The Go Color 7 ($249.99) runs Android, so you can install the Kindle, Kobo, and Libby apps side by side and never get locked into one store. It also has a color screen for picture books and comics, plus 64 GB of storage.

The trade-offs: it isn’t waterproof, it costs the most of my three picks, and all that freedom means more fiddling with settings. Great for tinkerers, maybe too much for someone who just wants to read.

A few others worth knowing

• Kindle Paperwhite ($159.99): The crowd favorite. A great reader if you mostly buy from Amazon, and library books still work by sending them from Libby (US only).
• Nook GlowLight 4 ($149.99): Worth a look if you’re a Barnes & Noble shopper.
• Kindle Scribe ($399.99): A big reader you can write on. Handy for marking up PDFs and lesson materials, but pricey.
• Your phone or tablet ($0): Don’t sleep on what you already own. A free reading app turns it into an e-reader, it’s just harder on the eyes for long stretches.

My rule of thumb: if you borrow from the library a lot, go Kobo. If you mostly buy from Amazon, go Kindle. If you want to do everything, go Boox.

The real secret: Libby + your library card

If you take one thing from this post, let it be this: you can borrow e-books and audiobooks from your library for free. All you need is a library card and the Libby app.

Sign in with your card, search for a book, and borrow it or place a hold. When it’s ready, it shows up for a couple of weeks and then returns itself, so no late fees, ever.

Kobo makes this even easier, because you can sign in with your library card right on the device and borrow without touching your phone. Popular books can have a wait, so I keep a few holds going at once and there’s always something ready.

Other handy reading apps

• Hoopla: Another free library app, if your library has it. Great backup when Libby has a long wait.
• Kobo and Kindle apps: Read your e-books on your phone when your reader’s at home.
• Kobo bonus: Kobo will allow you to upload an epub directly to your device even if you bought it somewhere else!
• StoryGraph: My go-to for tracking what I’ve read and what’s next, and I love picking books by mood (yes, I’m also a little obsessed with my stats). Goodreads works too if your friends are already there.

That’s my setup! If you have a library card hiding in your wallet, go download Libby tonight. Your next book might already be waiting.

So what is Bookhounds? It’s my little corner of the internet for the things I care about most. You’ll find book reviews and recommendations, mostly fantasy, but also whatever my students are currently obsessed with, because if a book has a room full of teenagers talking, I want to know why.

You’ll also find posts for my fellow teachers. My first couple of years in the classroom were a lot, and I picked up plenty of lessons the hard way. I’d love to save you some of that trouble, whether it’s a classroom system that actually works, a laptop that can survive a school year, or how to keep a side gig going without burning out!

This blog is just for fun, so expect a relaxed pace and an honest voice. Right now I’m writing this from the couch with a cup of tea and Cal snoring beside me, which is exactly the energy I hope this place has!

Thanks for stopping by! Up first: a deep dive into e-readers. It’s great to make every cent count these days, so I’ll explore the options that are out there, the cheapest one, the one I use, and the one with the most versatility.

Until then, grab a book, scratch a good boy behind the ears, and stick around. I’m so glad you’re here!

— Hannah