Maximum Ride series

Right now, I’m in the middle of reading the Maximum Ride series by James Patterson. It’s very different from many of the other books I’ve read, on many different points – primarily the topic, the writing style, and the characters. The story is about six kids — ranging from six to fourteen years of age — who are genetically altered; that is, they have avian (bird) DNA grafted on their own human DNA. So basically, they’re part bird. The series is centered around the main character, Maximum Ride (called Max), who is supposed to save the world. She and her “family” of other experiments — Fang, Iggy, Nudge, Gazzy, and Angel — are always on the run from “Erasers” (human-lupine combinations [part wolf]), who are pretty much the bad guys in the series. They want to catch the kids and take them back to the School, which is where the scientists (or “whitecoats”, the other bad guys) experiment on people — or more specifically, kids.

The writing style of Maximum Ride is much like reading a journal, which — from the prologue of book 1 — is what the author intended for it to be. The books are written in first person point-of-view, from Max’s perspective. The dialogue and even narration have a humorous and witty style, throwing in common “teen slang” phrases and words, and the characters tease each other, mimicking real life friends’ and siblings’ dialogue. The biggest reason that TV is so popular (other than the fact that it’s one of the easiest ways to be entertained — click “power”, done) is because it’s usually easy to relate to the characters, even more so than in books and other formats of story-telling. Directors, producers, screen writers — they all work on making the characters seem like real people, through the dialogue, movements, facial expressions, everything. However, books like the Maximum Ride series prove that the modern voice of teenagers and pre-teens (and pretty much any other age group) really can be captured in words. Writing sure is cool, isn’t it?

-Andrea