★★★☆☆
Back in the 90s, I was full of TNG awe. It’s the first “grown up” TV show I latched onto (my parents watched it by themselves for years because it came on after my bedtime — so I heard the Red Alert noise, the theme music, and other sounds before I ever watched the show).
Also in the 90s, I got into reading with more of my own agency. Sure, I was still in school, and to this day I get cringey when I hear the words “required reading”, but I learned that not all books were mind-numbingly boring, and I looked forward to going to the bookstore for more than just the little toy section.
The Nancy Drew Files were an easy pick for me at the time — they were actually written in the 80s and 90s, as opposed to the “original” series, which was favorable to my boring parents. (Tom Swift IV was another rebooted Stratemeyer Syndicate-adjacent series about a young inventor who did time travel and other cool stuff. I picked that one because they looked enough like Nancy Drew files to pique my interest, and the guy on the cover was handsome. Couldn’t read the Hardy Boys Casefiles, though, because they were for boys. Face-palm emoji.) I liked Sunfire romances (even though I argued profusely they weren’t romances, because for some reason there was a mortal stigma attached to that genre) because their cover artwork was beautiful, and they showcased different eras in such an interesting way. Sure, there was a love triangle, but the stories, man.
Around the same time I started watching TNG (not just listening to it from down the hall), my sister and I discovered a young adult book series about the same characters: Star Trek: The Next Generation – Starfleet Academy. Like it says on the tin.
At the time, there were only two or three books in the series, and we burned through them pretty quickly. Lucky for us, the same authors also wrote for the Star Trek books in the adult section, so on our regular trips to the used bookstore, we picked a few of those up. One of them was Metamorphosis by Jean Lorrah.
Continue reading “Star Trek: The Next Generation – Metamorphosis by Jean Lorrah (March 1990)”