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The Graceview Patient by Caitlin Starling

Margaret lives with a rare autoimmune condition that has destroyed her life, leaving her isolated. It has no cure, but she’s making do as best she can—until she’s offered a fully paid-for spot in an experimental medical trial at Graceview Memorial. The conditions are simple, if grueling: she will live at the hospital as a full-time patient, subjecting herself to the near-total destruction of her immune system and its subsequent regeneration. The trial will essentially kill most of, but not all of her. But as the treatment progresses and her body begins to fail, she stumbles upon something sinister living and spreading within the hospital. Unsure of what's real and what is just medication-induced delusion, Margaret struggles to find a way out as her body and mind succumb further to the darkness lurking throughout Graceview's halls. PUBLISHER: St. Martin's Press YEAR: 2025 LENGTH: 320 pages AGE: Adult GENRE: Horror RECOMMENDED: Highly Queer Rep Summary: No canon queer rep. *I...

Visser by K. A. Applegate

Visser by K. A. Applegate has to balance two competing ideas: Hatred for a main enemy of the Animorphs, with some sympathy for her. The explanations are moving and the story is very good but we are not endeared to her. It also sets up the history of the Yeerk invasion on Earth.

It's a very good explanation of how we arrived at this point, but even Visser One's explanation of her own actions are not enough to make her host care about her. Parts of it are things that we might accept from a human as reasons for her actions, but if they were really her motiviation then it wouldn't have made sense for her to call the Yeerk Empire to Earth in the first place. There's something interesting there, both in how the cognitive dissonance is portrayed, and in how each step makes sense with the steps before and after. Even with this, the path of her actions meanders wildly between something understandable to (and even approved of by) her fellow Yeerks, and something that is very, very, human.

A blue centaur-like alien (and Andalite) stands in front of a field of stars

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