All right, I hope I don't get in trouble for this, and believe me, I am sad to even be saying this. I work at a library, I shelve books every day. And one of the most popular authors I shelve is James Patterson. Everyone loves Patterson. Everyone reads Patterson. I could only assume that he must have been one of the most brilliant authors of all time.
So, I decided to give it a go. I'd been wanting a new YA book series to read, so, hey, why not Maximum Ride? Kids with wings, I can go with that. Sounds good. I'll start with the adult book: When the Wind Blows to start out and go from there. It has to be better than the kids books anyway, right?
Oh, how wrong I was.
Now, I realise all too well that I am a struggling author, and I will never *ever* be James Patterson. And so, perhaps, writing such a book review does make me a little nervous, but, what the heck, I'm going to anyway.
This book was awful.
From the very first page, I began to get a worrisome knot in my stomach of Oh, no...this is not good writing. Surely the whole book cannot be like this.
Oh, but it could, and it only got worse.
I am not going to really get into the plot. Girl who was a science experiment breaks out of some top secret lab and flies away. Some FBI agent comes looking, falls in love with a ditsy veterinarian, and they adopt the kid, stop the bad guys and all is well.
First off, the writing was just awful. I wasn't sure if it was just me, because, surely it could not be true. Yet when a few of my co-workers agreed that Patterson's work was "atrocious" I could relax a little. The only way I can explain it is: He wrote out a rough draft. He didn't go over it any more than that. Off to the agent. Either that or he didn't actually write it at all. He is rather a puppy mill for books, and perhaps when that happens, you don't get to care too much about each sentence. But there are editors, aren't there? I could honestly say that probably a 5th grader wrote it.
Besides the writing, which was simply awful, were the characters. There was nothing to latch on to, nothing to care about. If they lived, died, fell in love, were sad, happy, none of it had the slightest impression on me. When I'm reading a book, I want to connect with the characters. I want to become friends with them. I want to remember them years from now and still smile, and perhaps want to go back and visit them. These folks? I am not even sure I could tell you their names I have forgotten them so quickly. Nothing about them left anything to be desired. They were, I must say, all idiots.
And then there's the plot itself. Flimsy, confusing. The "bad guys" behave in ways that really make no sense whatsoever. They kill without being careful about it (um, we are trying to have a secret base, aren't we?) leave huge amounts of evidence everywhere without thoughts, somehow, inexplicably, the bad guy is really(spoiler) *gasp* a good guy, but we didn't even know who the good guy was because he wasn't even in the book. WOW. GREAT.
But don't worry. No animals were harmed! He made extra, extra sure (I swear that is how these sentences were worded) that no animals got hurt! Whew!
Yeah, okay, some babies were, but whatever. (Yes, the human experiments were just about the only interesting/disturbing part of this story, and they were hardly focused on. I THOUGHT THAT WAS THE POINT?)
Anyway, it goes without saying, I will not be reading the series. Sorry folks. Perhaps I'm just picky. But it takes a lot for me to want to abandon a book, and this one came mightily close.
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