We decided to ask our Best in Class team to share some of their favorite books or series that impacted them as a person or what they thought about the world. One of our teachers Jennifer Vandergrift shared her thoughts on one of her favorite book series and why it made an impact.
From Jennifer Vandergrift:
Many
stories, especially those for children and teenagers, depict a reductive view
of good and evil: these people are good, and those people are evil. K. A.
Applegate’s Animorphs was one of the
first stories I read that had shades of gray.
The
series is about a group of teenagers who fight an invasion of parasitic aliens.
At first, these aliens are portrayed simplistically as purely evil. However, in
the nineteenth book, The Departure,
one of the teenagers, Cassie, is discovered by one of the aliens, Aftran Nine
Four Two, and they begin a dialogue about the ethics of being a parasite versus
being a predator. In the end, Aftran lets Cassie go free; in a later book, we
learn that she has joined an underground peace movement opposing her own people.
It
is easy to look at a group as a monolith, all alike. However, this book showed
me as a child that even an “evil alien race” is composed of individuals. It is
wrong to judge people based on the stereotypes of the groups to which they
belong.
I
recommend The Departure and the
entire Animorphs series for its
surprisingly complex study of morality.
We'd love to hear what book made an impact on your through our Best in Books contest! Visit our Facebook page or enter here!
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