Jake, Rachel, Cassie, Tobias, and Marco are fairly typical kids on their way home from hanging out at the mall when they have an encounter of the weirdest kind. It was kind of creepy in an exciting way cutting across the pit and gravel of the construction site but they never expected to spot a UFO crash landing, nor the alien who emerged asking for their help. Before they can fully grasp what is happening, other nastier aliens show up and seem to be working with humans to somehow infiltrate the Earth.

It might have all been a dream by the time they woke the next morning but the first alien seems to have left a gift behind, a certain power which will give the five friends a tool in their fight against what is happening to their world. Without knowing who they can trust among the grownups, the fate of all humans seems to be in their hands.

Popular when they first came out in 1996, Scholastic has reissued this wonderfully adventurous and just-creepy-enough series in new packaging featuring a very cool morphing almost 3D illustration on each cover. The Animorphs series has all the best elements of the books I loved to read in grade school: kids empowered to make a difference, strong science fiction or fantasy elements woven into an otherwise ordinary world, and characters that have honest quirks and human failings yet still manage to do amazing things beyond what they always believed they could do when the chips are down. I am glad to see these books back in print, ready for the next batch of young readers to dive in to the adventure.

THE INVASION is book one of six in the Animorphs series, and features Jake as he discovers the adults in his life are right, growing up is all about change, but the kind of changing he's doing lately is probably not what they meant.