Maximum Ride: Final Warning By James Patterson Release Date: Avaliable Now Little, Brown and Company Ratings Action Romance Characters Overall Purchase on Amazon Purchase at Powell’s Find independent bookstores

Maximum Ride was created to save the world. Now she just needs to figure out how the voice in her head thinks she’s going to do this.

With the rest of her flock of Avian-Human hybrids, Max moves from taking down evil corporations to stopping global warming (’cause penguins are cute and hurricanes are bad!).

Now, if only Patterson could be bothered to finish one plot thread before moving on to six more.

If this hadn’t been a Maximum Ride book, I would have never finished it, and most likely never even bought it. My general love for Max and the flock is the only thing that got me through all the pages of propaganda about global warming. There were lectures. Multiple page long lectures about global warming. Now, there has always been a definite undertone of eco-warrior, clean up pollution, corporations are bad, etc. in the books. But that took a sideline to the action and characters. In this book, I really felt that Patterson just wanted to talk about global warming and decided to use Max to get his point across.

Supposedly, this is the last book, but if it isn’t, I will be hard pressed to pick up a new title. Whatever your feelings on global warming are, I hate being lectured to in fiction and feeling like someone is dumping their propaganda down my throat. Barely anything even happened in the book, they were too busy talking about global warming. I’m all for empowering kids to make a difference in the world, but I also want them to think about multiple sides of an issue, I want them to question and read scientific studies for themselves, not listen to a pop culture icon tell them how "it is." I mean, how many of us lived through the "Just say no" drug campaigns of the 90s, not to mention the "This is your brain, this is your brain on drugs" scare tactics. At least now they have commercials that go "I got high. Nothing happened. Nothing at all. I just sat on my couch all day like an idiot. You know what? I don’t want to get high anymore, so that something can actually happen in my life." Stuff like that tells it more how it is. Sure, Max questions slightly if it’s "really bad if the world gets a few degrees warmer," but they stick to the scare tactics and over dramatization that has been popular in global warming ever since An Inconvenient Truth. Complete with ending the book with "worst hurricane ever recorded" (which huh, the bad guys seemed to know was coming, so maybe it wasn’t all natural? Never explored this in the book of course).

This book offended me. I feel like Patterson thinks that I have no right to decide for myself what’s really happening or not in global warming and that I’m so stupid that I need to be scared into doing what he has decided is the right thing. And what gets me even more is that nobody says a word about this book being such a propaganda tool, but if I wrote a book about a group of kids spreading a counter message, that maybe global warming is part of a natural cycle and that there are more issues involved than just human innovation and existence, then you can bet a million groups would be descending on me like I was trying to poison their children’s minds by telling them Santa Claus isn’t real.

The hundred pages or so that weren’t devoted to saying "global warming=BAD" were enjoyable though. More Max and Fang romantic confusion and tension–I feel like Patterson has that relationship pretty well fleshed out, though I’d like to see some closure or at least some more forward movement. Their relationship really hasn’t evolved much from the last book. And at the beginning of this book, they have the funeral for Ari, and I feel so sorry for that kid. Rereading the series before I read this book, my heart just broke for him. He’s easily the most tragic character in the series. Still, I only felt like maybe a fourth of the book was about the characters, a fourth on action, and a half on, well, see above. There are so many interactions and relationships that still need to be fleshed out in the books. Max and Jeb especially have a complex relationship that I’d like to see keep evolving. I rather doubt this really is the last book. Patterson left too much open, we still know nothing about the voice, and there’s a lot about Max and the flock that keeps getting hinted at, then abandoned. I cringe to think of another book though, as disappointing as this one was to me overall. Maybe he’ll fast forward a bit, let Max grow up some. I’d really like to see Max be a little older, because I think her character interactions are at a standstill until she matures a bit more, then her relationships with Jeb and Fang, as well as the rest of the flock, will be able to expand. (Edit - Yep, there is a fifth book listed on amazon. Yay -_-. Maybe this one will have character development. Or maybe they’ve decided to cool off the world by beating their wings really fast.)

Okay, and seriously, if you call one more bad guy "the director" then, you know what, James Patterson? I’m gonna hit you over the head with a thesaurus. I’m beginning to feel like he doesn’t actually read his own writing once he’s finished. Not only are there three bad guys called the director (oh, sorry, one is the Uber-Director), but in one book one person was indicated to be "The Director," and the next book it’s someone else. He repeats *a lot* of the same kinds of things, has inconsistent chronology (exactly how long does it take to fly somewhere? Huh? Seems to vary by book), never mentioned Nudge was black in the first book (at least not that I could find, I’m thinking he didn’t decide that till book two…), and leaves me wondering how even a windbreaker can cover up their wings enough that they don’t look like hunchbacks. And, yeah, the wings thing. I really want to see the movie/manga, because I cannot picture how it’s supposed to work. Their wing tips should at least fall over their butt. Fourteen feet of actual bone, feather, and muscle only becomes so compact. And they mention cutting slits in jackets, but what about their shirts? And it doesn’t seem like they would be able to just snap their wings out of those slits as easily as they always do. Especially while wearing backpacks and such. But okay, enough over-thinking these books. I think the more the author lectures to me about science and real world stuff, the more I question how unlikely his books are to be able to happen in the real world.

Something else I thought of a few days after finishing the book–okay, biggest hurricane in recorded history happens. That’s really, really bad, right? Yet, that hurricane is the only reason Max and the flock get away from the Uber-Director. Huh. Global warming bad. But without it, Max and the flock were in big trouble. Bit of a problem with your message there, huh, Patterson? Once again, I don’t think he’s rereading what he writes.

Ratings Reasons:
Action 2 – This book felt slower than the other two, and like there simply wasn’t as much happening. The pacing was like the others, short chapters, action fast when it happened, but something about it just seemed less action packed.

Romance 1 1/2 – Max and Fang are at a standstill. I can understand Max’s hesitations, but from a storytelling aspect, something needs to move this forward. Every romance point had already been done in a previous book.

Characters 1 1/2 – I feel like there was so much unused potential. We have a large enough cast now to explore a lot more of Max’s relationships, but instead Patterson put that to the wayside in favor of "Global Warming BAAAAAD." New characters keep being introduced, multiple characters from the last book have just disappeared without any indication of what happened to them (Other Max and Anne come to mind), and I just wish he could focus on consistency.

Overall 1 – I love Max still, even if she was lecturing us for three whole pages at the end of the book. (I skipped those pages. The ending was extremely uninteresting.) But I think I might have to go read some fan fiction to fill the void this book left in me.

Extras:
It’s recently been announced that there’s a Maximum Ride movie in the works. And it’s past the stage of "well, maybe somedayyyyyy…" Mostly they seem to be trying to pick up the female superhero fans, but I’m cool with that. We’ll see how that goes. Plus, we have a manga starring Max coming out in January 2009 (Just saw a copy of chapter one, looking good, except for Fang’s really long hair -_- Looks like a girl.).

I think all superhuman, genetic hybrids, need to name themselves Max. And those Maxes can certainly only have one personality. I always enjoyed the Dark Angel series, though plenty of people can call it sexist or cheesy. Don’t get me started on the second season either. But if you like the whole genetically messed up and trying to survive in a strange world after breaking out of the facility you were raised in sort of plot, give Dark Angel a try.

Parents: 13+, Honestly, I don’t want you to give your kids this book. I think that this kind of propaganda is brainwashing kids/teens, telling them to only think what others tell them to think, whether it be about drugs or recycling.

Trackback Post

Related Posts