The First Journey

Alternamorphs #1

by K.A. Applegate

What would you do if you had the chance to become an Animorph? To hang out and battle the Yeerks with Jake and the crew? Now Animorphs fans can get in on the action in this "choose-your-own adventure" type book!.

Genres: Science Fiction, Young Adult, Fiction, Fantasy, Childrens, Adventure, Middle Grade

115 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1999

About the author

also published under the name Katherine Applegate

Reviews

[Josiah · Rating 1 out of 5]

If the name on the cover belongs to the actual author of this book, then The First Journey, to the best of my knowledge, is the first gamebook in history to be written by a Newbery Medalist. Yes, Katherine Applegate, author of The One and Only Ivan, was chief literary architect of the Animorphs empire, years before the Newbery committee awarded her its coveted top prize, and alongside the main Animorphs series were several offshoots. Was Katherine Applegate the real author of the two-book Animorphs: Alternamorphs addendum, or were they ghostwritten, to give her a break after the effort she put into writing the primary series? We may never know the answer for sure, though I could ask her about it if I ever meet her at another bookstore event. I would be quite interested in learning if Alternamorphs was her work.

"Because sometimes the stuff you see in the movies, the stuff you thought could never, ever happen to you...well, it can happen. It does happen. I've seen it."

—The First Journey, from the Introduction

For fans of Animorphs, the background for The First Journey is already well-known, but a short introductory piece is included for those of us without prior Animorphs experience. You initially are an outsider to the regular group of Animorph kids—Jake, Marco, Cassie, Rachel and Tobias—but your desire for a little late-night skateboarding puts you in position to witness a bizarre alien creature come and ask the Animorphs for help. Your assistance is requested, as well. The Andalite race is in serious trouble from the predatory Hork-Bajir aliens, and so is humanity. Desperate for all the help he can muster, the Andalite leader endows you with the same Animorph power your five new friends have, before he meets a grim fate at the hands of the enemy. You and the more experienced Animorphs must flee the initial extermination attempt of the Hork-Bajir, then circle back and infiltrate its legions to prevent them from overrunning the planet. You'll have the exact same Animorphing power at your disposal as the other five, but choose your morphs cautiously: selecting the wrong animal in this book leads to swift death. Messing with animal DNA is serious stuff. To survive your battle with predatory aliens, you'll need cunning, intelligence, and some good luck, plus the knowhow to work effectively with your Animorph compatriots, understanding one another's strengths and weaknesses and how to utilize them to save the world. Can you do what it takes to band together and decisively repel the extraterrestrial menace?

This beginning to the Alternamorphs miniseries features some unusual game elements worth noting. For starters, the book has only one ending, if it can be called that; it just kind of drifts off into nothingness on page one hundred nine, leaving readers to assume the end has been reached. While many choice intersections offer three decisions, only one is ever the correct animal to morph into; any other choice soon ends with a grisly death or lifetime sentence trapped in the body of the animal you became, at which point you're instructed to turn back to your last decision and try again. The story elements often confused me, and there were a few continuity errors in the text, too. I'm not sure the narrative made perfect linear sense, either. I can't say The First Journey isn't a difficult gamebook, however; the logic behind the right choice to be made at each juncture teeters perilously close to pure randomness, and it would take almost a miracle to make it successfully to the end on one's first attempt. If you do, congratulations: you're a better gamebook player than I. Well, a luckier one, at least.

What's my verdict on the first Alternamorphs installment? I have to believe it was a ghostwriter, not Katherine Applegate, who penned this paperback (Tonya Alicia Martin, perhaps? I've seen places online that credit her as the ghostwriter). Still, there are glimmers of interestingness, and it's a fun story if one isn't expecting too much from it, either as a gamebook or a middle-grade novel. I'm sure the main series is superior, but fans who can't get enough of the Animorphs universe may enjoy interacting in these gamebooks with the characters they already know so well. If you want to find out what the Animorphs books are really like, though, start with the main series. That's the place to begin if you want to see what a talented writer Katherine Applegate can be.

[Weathervane · Rating 1 out of 5]

Poor. The book manages to be mostly incoherent; nothing is explained properly. For instance, we start out at the first pool raid, but the second part of the book jumps way ahead to a point after Ax is found. The transition is very clumsy, and what's more, if you haven't read the books on which the two stories are based, you'll be entirely lost. I knew what was going on during the first section, but the second section was a complete mystery.

The characters do not act like themselves; Ax actually says, "Cooler than my tail?" Yeah, no. That's not Ax. Your "character" basically has no relationships with the other Animorphs. You're just a cardboard cutout.

The gamebook design is terrible. A choice either kills you or allows you to go on; there is no branching plot! The author obviously didn't understand what made gamebooks fun. It's not the blind trial-and-error. And the deaths -- oh, the deaths -- they're often shamefully stupid.

Then there are the weird inconsistencies. Ax shrugs at one point -- out of character, of course, but on the very next page he shrugs again and it is suggested that it may have been his first use of the gesture. Are you kidding me? This is just lazy.

Finally, add a decent share of typos to the list of faults.

This book blows.

[Jackie Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

I do not know how I ever would have survived junior high without this fantastic science fiction series. Maybe the story quality went down as the book numbers got higher, but the idea that aliens were invading our planet secretly... it was almost good enough for a young teenager to believe.

[Jerry (Rebel With a Massive Media Library) · Rating 2 out of 5]

Is this a novel or a "choose your own adventure" type of story? It's sort of a mixture of both, but not a very good one. Unless you're a die-hard fan of this series, I suggest sticking with the regular novels.

[Muffin · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was super whatever. I understand why they thought a choose your own adventure book would be fun but I don’t read these books for fun I read these books to explore feelings of survivors remorse and guilt over one’s role in an unwinnable guerilla war.

[Josh T · Rating 1 out of 5]

Wow. This was bad. I held off reading it because I figured it would be. It's a really sloppy choose your own adventure style book, but it does this very poorly. At one point Ax just appears in the book with no explanation at all. I was thrown off by that. Sloppy transition. All of a sudden, as well, the book ends... telling me I live to fight another day... what... nothing really happened... nothing was explained properly. This was not a long read, thankfully. This book is not necessary reading, and honestly, unless you are a completist, it isn't worth your precious time. I will probably read #2 at some point, just because... well ... I am a completist. But I don't expect it to be any better.

[Lauren · Rating 2 out of 5]

Unlike a lot of my Animorphs 2-star reviews, I do remember this one. It's a choose-your-own-adventure story. Mostly I remember choosing routes where I die a lot, then finding the happy ending and reading the story backwards from there. Probably not the best way to enjoy one of these types of books.

[Emily Brockmeier · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not the best Animorphs content I’ve read. In fact, probably the worst!

As far as a chose-your-own-adventure, The bad endings come out of nowhere, leaving you feeling cheated after having made a relatively obvious choice, only to have a curveball thrown at you. “You should have thought about this!” When it’s information we haven’t been told at all— not even in the main series of books!

The different choices also down lead anywhere. If you make the wrong choice, you get one or two pages of explaining why your choice was wrong, followed by a message that you were stupid for choosing that one and to go back to the last branching point.

There are also only ever single “right” choices, leaving the book feeling much more linear than any CYOA has a right to be. I read the whole thing through without skipping any pages (mostly to see all the endings) and as mentioned above, the deviations from the script only last a page or two.

As far as the actual story goes, this was a lazy attempt to shoe-horn an extra character into the events of the first book, and when that plot runs out of gas, they’re suddenly inside another sario rip??? They bring back one of the most confusing plot points so confuse is even further, and of course it’s all buttered up with the excuse that Ax wasn’t paying attention during that day of school. That joke got old the first time around.

Even the second-person writing feels clumsy. It’s painfully obvious that they couldn’t give a Y/N character a name, so they dance around it the whole time in a way that really takes you out of the narrative, and which other CYOA books have handled much more gracefully.

It also felt very rushed. I hadn’t made a single decision before I had to make another one on the very next page that pivoted the plot completely! The story went in one direction the entire time, but it felt like someone who doesn’t know how to drive was fitfully accelerating and decelerating the whole time, giving me whiplash and probably a neck ache when I wake up in the morning.

If you’re a die-hard fan, might as well pick this up, but otherwise it’s really not worth it, especially if you age to buy it from an e-bay seller trying to say it’s vintage and trying for a 50 dollar price tag. (Not a personal experience but I’m sure they exist.)

I’d say it’s a 2.5 out of 5, purely because there were a couple lines than made me smile.

[Hillary · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Animorphs reread continues! I never encountered these choose your own adventure books the first time around, but they're pretty cool. They also give you the opportunity to get eaten by a sloth, so that was fun. Definitely be careful choosing morphs. The background plot was pretty confusing, but not particularly important to the reading experience, so that was okay.

[Wolverinefactor · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a silly little romp. Surprised I only had one death. Perfect quick read I needed on the holiday. Next Friday is another holiday so I’ll be diving into the other one of these. Curious where it takes place.

[Stephanie · Rating 1 out of 5]

Nope. Nope nope nope. The first half of this book covers The Invasion (Animorphs #1), and the second covers The Forgotten (Animorphs #11). I knew I didn’t like it as a kid and never made the right decisions the first (or sometimes even the second) time to avoid a quick death. Because that is how the options work: one is the correct decision, the other two will lead you straight to death. I made the correct choice on the first try once for sure, and maybe a second time. Plus some of the phrasings and word choices and even canon-related events are messed up:

Marco calling Prince Elfangor “Prince Elfa-diddle” on page 15: Even if he hadn’t remembered his name, he would NOT have substituted “diddle” for say, “something” – he watched Elfangor die, and he knows about respect.

Jake crying “Let’s morph!” on page 60 in the Yeerk pool cave complex – again, nope, he wouldn’t have yelled that for all to hear, unless I am horribly misremembering how book 1 went (I would check it, but I have lent it out at the moment).

Tobias perching on Rachel’s shoulder as soon as they leave the Yeerk pool complex on page 64 – NOPE, Tobias was trapped in the complex and did NOT make it out at the same time as everyone else – which is how he was trapped in morph in the first place, duh.

A new Sario Rip that the reader is experiencing, in the same manner that Jake first experienced the Sario Rip on page 71. Um… okay, way to jump way ahead in the books, and yet still manage to make it weird and play with the Sario Rip rules (the few that we know, that is), and still make it seem like a stretch and not quite right – for one thing, when a Sario Rip happens, to the best of my knowledge there is NO WAY to control where/when you will end up.

Visser Three placing himself (as an Andalite!) into a chair on the Blade ship bridge. Um, hello? Andalite’s don’t sit down on ships. Or anywhere else if they’re not asleep, I think. So….if they’re trying to make it sound like he’s sitting in the captain’s chair on the ship, it is unnecessary because a) he’s in an Andalite body, and b) everyone knows he’s the captain anyways. He’s not the type to sit down on the job, either.

So over all: could have been a good premise, but it broke the world logic/rules too often, and felt too forced, and there was no complexity in any of the choices (not to mention you didn’t know some of the background you could have used in order to make the “right” decisions – some of which seemed like they would not make sense or work anyways – like the giraffe one to literally kick Visser Three and end the Sario Rip). I seem to remember that the old “Choose Your Own Adventure” books would have a couple of choices, and you had to make a couple of wrong ones in a row before you found yourself very, very dead.

[Joe Kessler · Rating 1 out of 5]

I went into my adult reread of this choose-your-own-adventure Animorphs title with pretty low expectations, and yet it somehow still managed to disappoint. Who exactly is the audience here? The tone is more juvenile than the main novels, with lots of exclamation marks and a focus on the surface-level action rather than any deeper themes of sacrifice or the toll of trauma on child guerilla soldiers. The heroes are flat too, not to mention remarkably out-of-character throughout. (Ax's dialogue alone is a travesty.) And Yeerk Controllers can suddenly be confused by earth customs and detected just by watching to see who's acting strangely, despite how they've always had complete access to their host minds and blended in seamlessly to the environment before.

That all suggests a project that maybe wasn't designed for the fans, but the story takes so many unexplained leaps that I can't imagine a newcomer being able to follow along instead. The plot holes and contradictions like that nonsensical sario rip are weird even if you have a general sense of how the continuity "should" go, and lacking that context would surely make everything worse. Perhaps the as-yet-anonymous ghostwriter was likewise unfamiliar with the series, although that doesn't explain why credited author K. A. Applegate or her editors let the resulting text go to print in such a flawed state. In any event, it's a missed opportunity both to reward long-time readers by truly immersing them in the world of this franchise and to offer a compelling alternate on-ramp for anyone drawn to check out this volume first.

Structurally, it's not much of a gamebook either; there are a total of six points at which we're invited to pick among two or three options of what animal to morph, and in every case, all but one choice leads to death within a few pages. Really great choosable-path fiction offers a branching narrative that develops multiple competing throughlines and would take significant dedication to map out entirely. This book has only one correct plot to it, and it's not a particularly enjoyable one at that. At least the whole thing is non-canon, and thus can be safely dismissed as a simple low-quality cash grab.

[Content warning for body horror and gun violence.]

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[Julie Decker · Rating 1 out of 5]

THIS IS A CHOOSE-YOUR-OWN-ADVENTURE-STYLE ANIMORPHS BOOK. IT IS NOT PART OF THE CANON (and, as a personal aside, is not recommended by me). The book allows you, the reader, to "become" part of the Animorphs by putting you there when Elfangor lands and allowing you to acquire the morphing power, then presenting you with a series of decisions (choose-your-own adventure style) to dictate the plot. Story elements of the first book and the eleventh book are incorporated, allowing the reader to participate in the first trip to the Yeerk pool with the Animorphs and a strange altered version of a second trip through the Sario Rip plot leading into the Amazon jungle. There is only one winning ending, which involves using accidental time travel to stop Visser Three from killing Visser One's host before Visser One entered the picture, and you get to eat pizza with Jake.

Overall these are poorly conceived and pretty cheap. Not a necessary or enjoyable addition to the Animorphs universe.

[Kelsey · Rating 1 out of 5]

Unnecessary, generic choose your own adventure Animorphs. Turns out that in this alternate universe, you were also at the abandoned construction site and became an Animorph. The first half of the book covers the first original book, and the second half is a new adventure involving a Sario Rip.

[Juushika · Rating 2 out of 5]

A chose your own adventure rehash of previous events means few plot developments and no character growth, so while this is a perfect fit to the intended audience and the series's power fantasy wish-fulfillment, it's just ... not very good; the writing also feels weaker here than in previous books. But the prevalence of death is fascinating--in the CYOA books I remember from my childhood, the wrong ends were frequently ridiculous, fun black humor; the tone here is different, as the ends parallel the violence and close calls native to the series (sometimes exactly, like being eaten when in an insect morph) and Jake's recent parallel-timeline death in particular. To explore that in second person echoes the insistence that opens each book that this series is taking place in the reader's own world. It's not a particular robust reading, and not a good book, but it speaks to one of the throughlines I'm enjoying most in this series.

[Dread · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Solace: Animorphs but make it a choose your own adventure. This was pretty entertaining. We take a re-do at three of the previous stories inside this book, with the reader as the animorph, choosing which morphs in the moment. I definitely chose not the right morphs for a bit of it, but when I got it right it was very rewarding to know I could hang with the crew.

The Dread: The stories are a bit repetitive, some don't add too much to the stories we've already read. The structure was also not so great at the end, with the last two chapters being failed endings, which would be resolved with simple rearranging. The last chapter also was missing directionals for our adventure. and of course, this is inconsequential to the rest of the world.

Overall, this was just a fun and new way to experience the animorph series, one I enjoyed being a part of.

[Timbrr · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first read this many years ago, and I liked it probably as much today as I did back then.
It's a simple thing but being able to choose which animal you want to morph into (even if the wrong choice gets you dead. A lot.) is a fun experience.

It's not canonical, of course, but it is interwoven with bits of the canon, which is satisfying when you know what's going on, but maybe just confusing if you don't. But I'd probably advise people to read the main series (at least) before looking at this and the second Alternamorphs anyway.

It was a quick read, but still a good one.

[Justice · Rating 4 out of 5]

Both Choose Your Own Adventure and Animorphs are remarkably gruesome, so I was hoping to die in various creative ways in this book - my hope was rewarded! I think there's only one happy ending for you, the mountain biking freak - otherwise you die a lot, end up as a nothlit, and try to eat a toddler. Good times.

Some of the technical features of this book are messed up (one death makes you go back to a place you haven't been yet), but otherwise this was super fun. It covers the first book and the Sario Rip/jungle book (10?) - I lowkey wish there were more of these!

[Hazel · Rating 2 out of 5]

I love choose your own adventure books, but this is just not a good one. There is only one narrative. All other choices quickly lead to a dead end.
Also it has you being a sixth human member of the crew and tracing through alternate versions of stories past. Which just doesn't make much sense. Getting to be one of the main characters or a new character in the world would have been much more satisfying.

[Edie Walls · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love cyoa books, but I wasn't a fan of this. I was under the impression that this was going to be a new story, not an official self-insert cliff notes version of the first book and the eleventh book (one of my least favorites :/). Maybe that's my fault, but this is the first Animorphs book I read where I felt condescended to.

[Michael · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm reading the Animorphs series again as an adult, and I realize there's a reason I don't remember much about Alternamorphs. It's bad. In each numbered Animorphs book, there's usually enough at the beginning to catch the reader up if they're new to the series. This jumps around a lot, and each "wrong" decision gets the main character ("You") unalived. Stick to the main series.

[Thomas-James · Rating 3 out of 5]

Honestly not the best 'choose your own adventure' style novel I've read. Goosebumps did a way better job at this. Even the twist-a-plots were better! I could basically read this book from left to right.

[Jordan Baker · Rating 1 out of 5]

Poorly written, missing page numbers at the start of each chapter… which are sort of essential for a choose your own adventure book. The “story” is a mess that lacks any sort of continuity. I finished it, but only because it was so short.

[Helen · Rating 1 out of 5]

"Bad Morph" is NOT an actual concept and I'm mad about thr fact that I only get to choose what I morph into and nothing else. Also there shouldn't be only one good choice out of every path. Okay idea and extremely bad execution.

[Hew La France · Rating 3 out of 5]

My only real frustration with this book was that anytime one reaches a decision point, three options are given, and 2 of the three get the reader killed….. which isn’t the greatest set up for a game book.

[Drew DeYoung · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just found this in a box of my childhood things and decided to read it while sitting at the beach and I have no regrets. I’m a 32 year old man, but suddenly I was transported back to an eight year old with an over active imagination fighting aliens with my friends.
This is a fun nostalgic book for anyone who enjoyed the series back in the day, the glory days.

[Jonathan Grant · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, that was interesting.

[Gianna G. · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is an okay book, just not my type.

[Sandro · Rating 2 out of 5]

Fun experiment, but no real contribution to the story.

[LdyGray · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you can be a giraffe, be a giraffe.