| K.A. Applegate: Animorphs! |
 K.A. Applegate
Katherine Alice Applegate is best known for her work with Animorphs, and I have no special need to go into great detail about her life since there are so many other references that are sure to be more comprehensive and more up-to-date than I could manage:
But anyway, mainly I'd like to point out a couple things about Ms. Applegate that may not be known to the casual reader.
Besides Animorphs, Ms. Applegate wrote two other series for the same demographic: Everworld and Remnants. I read both of them. Everworld I could take or leave; it had a similar setup with five kids completely out of their element thrown together into a situation unlike any other on Earth, but I didn't find the characters or their problems as compelling. This was about high school kids being pulled from their regular lives into an alternate world called Everworld, which was ruled by the Old Gods, and having to try to help save the world even though they're in over their heads. As for Remnants, it started beautifully and spiraled down into weirdness only to finally end in an almost saccharine wrap-up, with a couple of delightful oases of dark/weird plights. It followed a group of people who narrowly escaped Earth when it was hit by an asteroid. After a time in suspended animation, they awaken to a very different reality and have to deal with the changes that have been made to some of them and of course trying to find a new place for the human race. I loved the way human nature was captured so well in the characters' interactions, but the bizarreness and the abrupt ending pretty much ruined it for me even though I still have an appreciation for some of the characters. A common theme to all of Ms. Applegate's work that I've read is that of pop culture references. She tends to insert references that are very current (dating the books necessarily in only a few months), but she also makes references that are from her own generation, which when said by child characters sound very out of place. She is also consistently good at the "man vs. self" conflict; characters' inner struggles are almost always believable. She also doesn't tend to make characters stereotypical; for instance, in Animorphs their most violent, tactless, ruthless fighter is female. And she is consistently somewhat subtly progressive with social issues, such as attacking homophobia in Everworld and supporting interracial dating in Animorphs. Read interviews with K.A. Applegate here.
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