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The Angel Experiment —
James Patterson
Maximum Ride Book 1★
Four years ago, a whitecoat named Jeb helped six mutant children – Max, Fang, Iggy, Nudge, Gasman, and Angel – escape from the School, a lab that added bird DNA to their genes. The kids can fly, have raptor vision, and are stronger than most adults. Two years ago, Jeb disappeared, and Max, the oldest at 14, has become the flock’s leader. When Erasers (half wolf guards from the School) kidnap Angel, the kids face their biggest fear to get her back. Along the way, they also search for information about the parents they never knew and mourn the normal lives they never got to live.
Review
The Angel Experiment, the first book in the Maximum Ride series, has a fun premise that doesn’t fully deliver. The book starts strong, getting right into the plot, and the action is gripping. Diving right into the plot didn’t keep me from understanding the characters. Their personalities come through from the first page. Their physicality and interactions with each other make them feel real, and I was pretty quickly invested in them. The characters and the mystery around where they come from and why they were created are the best parts of this book. The fight scenes fun too.
As the book approaches the 50% mark, it slows down quite a bit. There’s still consistent action, but most of it doesn’t go anywhere. A lot of scenes share one piece of information or reiterate something we already know, and a lot of that knowledge isn’t useful for this story. I expect it will come up later in the series, but these scenes took up a lot of space to not be relevant by the end of the book.
There are also a lot problems solved a little too conveniently. Eventually, I started to assume that any obstacle the flock faced would be solved fairly easily, even if I didn’t have any idea how it would work out. The novel leans too heavily on plot devices to keep things moving, and it just gets more and more noticeable as the story goes on. When the plot picks up again in the final act, the issue of convenience feels particularly egregious. The second half of the book has progresses the plot very little. I hoped that a lot of what felt like wasted space would actually help them meet their goals in some way, so it was disappointing to finish the book and realize there wasn’t any payoff – that the flock’s exploration of the setting, their conversations with each other, most of the people they met, etc. didn’t contribute anything to character development or the book’s climax.
The Angel Experiment also has an ableism problem. Iggy is blind, and it’s mentioned a lot throughout the book. The character himself is pretty solid representation in my opinion, though I’m not blind. His blindness impacts the way he interacts with the world, but it’s not a defining characteristic or his sole personality trait. Iggy does have heightened senses, which is a common trope for disabled people in fiction. In reality, losing one sense may slightly improve the others but not to the extent often seen is fiction. This is called sensory efficiency and is a result of more intentional focus on the remaining senses. There are other instances of ableism too, and it came up frequently enough to hinder my enjoyment of the book. This mostly showed up in weird dialogue or jokes around Iggy’s blindness that made me uncomfortable.
I have such mixed feelings about this book and my reading experience. I did love this series when I was younger, which colors my opinion now, and while I do have several issues with this first installment, there’s still potential for it to be really good moving forward. None of my issues with the book are inherent to the premise or the characters, so I’m hopeful for the rest of the series.
The ableism and meandering plot in the back half make it impossible for me to recommend this book. It could be a fun nostalgia read if you turn your brain off and don’t think about it after putting the book down, so it’s probably not going to be a good nostalgia read for most people either.
I’m planning to reread (and review) all nine books in the series because I learned a sequel duology, Hawk, came out in 2020 and 2021, and I need to know what happens. So if you want to know too, stick around!
Content warnings: ableism, child abuse, death, forced medical experimentation on children, kidnapping, violence
Felicity Morrow has returned to Dalloway School to finish her high school career. She lives in Godwin House, an exclusive dorm said to be haunted by five of Dalloway’s earliest students. Felicity is trying to leave the school’s occult past – and her abiding interest in it – behind, but transfer student Ellis Haley won’t let her forget it. Ellis recruits Felicity to help her research the Dalloway Five – the inspiration for her second novel. Felicity has some misgivings about the work, which only deepen when history starts to repeat itself.