Animorphs #32: The Separation Plot: Rachel is in starfish morph and gets cut apart. Both parts regenerate and both parts morph back to Rachel. One of them is a wimpy, ditzy Rachel, and the other is an evil twin; Rachel without a conscience. The underlying mission is to find and destroy the Anti-Morphing Ray, a device that can forcibly demorph an Andalite . . . or a human.

Main Plot Points:

• Rachel, because of being split while in starfish morph, when she morphs back the starfish regenerates into two separate Rachels, both with the same memories, but each one with one of the two extremes of Rachel's personality.
• The Yeerks are perfecting something called the Anti-Morphing Ray, which reverses the morphing technology to turn "Andalites" back to their natural form. They are exercising the utmost caution in making sure it does not get destroyed or captured . . .
• The Animorphs find that the Yeerks have acquired the Buyer's Research Institute to promote their other companies. It is unknown how much damage "Mean Rachel" did to the center and their projects there, but she prevented the group from getting to the AMR.
• The book ends, but the AMR is still out there . . .

Personality Conflicts:

• This book is pretty much *all* about Rachel. It shows the two faces that she has contained ever since she joined in the Animorphs war, and is also kind of an allegory of her dual nature tearing her apart.
• Marco practically admits that he has a slight crush . . . those statements about "one for Tobias and one for me" weren't all joke . . . I know I'm not the only one who thinks he was coming on to Nice Rachel, too . . . 

Notes and Observations:

• Rachel seems to always be the one getting into the freak accidents involving morphing. First it was the DNA allergy that destroyed her house (#17), then it was amnesia in MM1, now your classic split personality complex. All of which are arguably caused by mental conflicts. (With the possible exception of the first one, but I thing it represented Rachel's morphing troubles).
  
• It was strange to see the total extremity of the two personalities Rachel split into. One would expect two separate people, opposites, who could on the shallow side be identified as "good" or "evil," even though that isn't really true. But they are such extremes of their sides: Nice Rachel is a total ditz, talking about totally irrelevant things, her life revolving around shopping and gossiping and being a cliched ditz. While we learn later that she actually has most of Rachel's intelligence and her capacity for planning and strategy, she appears to be an airhead; she even includes "like" usages in her narratives.
  
  Mean Rachel, on the other hand, is pure fury and fighting tactics. She is the Rachel whose shadow we see in battles, the fierce warrior who lives only to fight and the power rushes she gains from it. Sometimes she seems feral, exhaulting herself as above mortality for dealing its consequences out to others. For her, killing is as vital and as sacred as life is (or should be) for us. She considers it a mark of her good mood if she doesn't kill some innocent passer-by, and shows absolutely no mercy or thought of pity for her enemies. To her the morals, the right and wrong of the war, is only an excuse to fight: the Yeerks are doing something bad, therefore, she must kill them. But, like the animal she resembles, she cannot plan, cannot strategize her move, cannot apply herself to analytical thinking even though she has the knowledge to do so. It is "surgically removed" from her, just like Nice Rachel's ability for coping with fear is.
  
  Perhaps the reason for the extremities was, like many other mental-related conditions, a subconscious desire to be that way. The two parts, separated by the starfish, had the fierce, determined half, morphing quickly to human to get revenge on the person who almost killed her, and the passive, conformist part, morphing back only when she thought it was safe. These two parts, each being one side of Rachel's mental struggle, developed mentally to their utmost extent, using the brain, the knowledge and potential, (not to mention the DNA), that they both shared. While Mean Rachel became the killing machine, Nice Rachel was the girl who held her back, the girl who just wanted to be a normal teenager, the gossiping, social butterfly mall rat that she may have become if the whole Animorphs thing had never happened.
  
  I think it's interesting that, when Rachel first split, the narration was continued by Mean Rachel. We get a sense that that is the real Rachel, if somewhat mutated, and Nice Rachel a wimpy clone. However, at the end of the book, when the two are joined again, it is Nice Rachel who continues to speak as Rachel resumes, once more whole. As she has been gradually getting more ruthless throughout the books (a certain climax in #22), it could show that the two parts have reconciled and that the nice, normal girl is back on top, though that streak of the warrior will always remain. She will probably have to wrestle with it again in the future, but the book ends on a hopeful note of Rachel's self-realization and determination to fight the war with control as well as strength.      

Comments:
Having finally read this book, I have to say, in spite of the negative reviews and comments like "K.A. wrote this? It must have been brain freeze," I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It was well-written, had a good basic setting, one of the best and most believable "background missions" in a book as of late, but most of all was the excellent character portrait of Rachel and her two faces, intensified to the enth degree. Some people said that it got boring after a while, but I thought it was fascinating to see the full extent of the split, and delving into the separate personalities of the two halves, both 100% Rachel in their own ways. In fact, because of this book Rachel moved back up to favorite character, just above Cassie and Tobias. 

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