Maximum Ride: The Angel Experiment, by James Patterson
Patterson, James (2005). Maximum Ride: The Angel Experiment. NY: Little, Brown. 422 pages.
I’m a little embarrassed that it’s taken me so long to sample one of Patterson’s popular “Maximum Ride” series; I must confess that the fact that the novel was written by James Patterson definitely had something to do with my reluctance to read his middle school/young adult series. That said, I was pleasantly surprised by the first installment of this fantasy/mystery series and, some minor criticisms aside (see below), I’ll probably read a couple more of these novels.
For those folks who, like me, had been ignoring the Maximum Ride series, here’s the basic set up: fourteen-year-old Maximum Ride considers the young people with whom she grew up–Max, Fang, Iggy, Nudge, the Gasman, and Angel–her family, even though only two of them are related by blood. All of them have, however, grown up in captivity. As products of a genetics experiment, Max and her friends are hybrids: part human and part avian. They have light bones, big appetites, and wings. They are living on their own and in hiding when Angel, the youngest of the group, is captured by a group of Erasers, genetically engineered part-wolf-part-human soldiers of The School (the lab where Max and company were raised). The first installment follows Max as she and her gang try to find and rescue Angel.
Fans of Patterson’s will recognize the short, almost choppy chapters that characterize his adult novels in this series as well. The focus in this series is on action, and the short chapters and minimal characterization help to move things along quickly. While this lack of character focus didn’t bother me too much (we’ll see how I feel as the series continues), I found it especially interesting that Patterson seemed to take pains to keep Max’s sex and gender from the reading audience. I didn’t really find out if Max was a boy or a girl until several chapters in. While, on one hand, the sex or gender of a character shouldn’t really matter, on the other, I wonder if this wasn’t a deliberate obfuscation. Cynically, I believe that this lack of sex characterization might contribute to the series’ popularity among boys and girls; however, I don’t have any real proof of this.
I am intrigued by the premise of this series and I do wonder what we will end up discovering about the gang of birdkids at the center of these novels. Here’s to hoping that the whole thing doesn’t get strung out ad-nauseum a la K.A. Applegate’s “Animorphs” series, which I loved, but got really tired of reading. To this day, I think it would have been really cool if it turned out that Jake was Vissar One. Oh, well.