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Common Sense Note

Parents need to know that there is a lot of violence here, some of it quite brutal, including serious injuries. There are broken noses and bones, knocked-out teeth, and some deaths, guns, explosions, and car chases. Also, the marketing for this book is pretty intense, including Blogspot and MySpace pages and a contest to put together a tie-in music CD.

Families who read this book could discuss the idea of human and animal experimentation. Clearly the scientists are the bad guys here, but are these types of experiments ever justified? You can also discuss the book's marketing. Why the tie-in CD and Web sites? Are there different standards for book and movie marketing? Could this kind of aggressive, movie-style marketing of a book actually be a good thing, or is it just manipulative?

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Common Sense Review

Reviewed By: Matt Berman

Author Patterson, best known for adult suspense novels, makes a foray into the young adult market with this book about a group of human/bird hybrids. For teens who just want action and excitement (and perhaps for reluctant readers as well) and who don't much care about the niceties, such as logic, character development, consistent voice, or plot, this will be plenty of fun. There's lots of gritty violence, but no sex, drugs, or language problems to worry parents (at least those who don't worry about gritty violence). And there's the fantasy of winged flight, always a kid-pleaser.

The entire book amounts to little more than a prologue to the series. Despite more than 400 pages of chases, fights, break-ins, and almost non-stop action, practically nothing actually happens. They are captured, they escape, they are cornered, they escape, they are wounded, they recover, they try to hide, they are found, over and over again. Very little of it makes any kind of sense, though there are plenty of hints that it will eventually -- but not in this book. It ends, not so much with a cliffhanger, as with a lot of things set up and nothing much coming to fruition yet.

From The Book

I soared up past the cliff edge, past the startled hounds and the furious Erasers.

One of them, hairy-faced, fangs dripping, raised his gun. A red dot of light appeared on my torn nightgown. Not today, you jerk, I thought, veering sharply west so the sun would be in his hate-crazed eyes.

I'm not going to die today.

Plot Summary:

Max and five other kids, "the flock," were created by evil scientists at a place called the School, by combining human and avian DNA. They can fly, are unusually strong, and have a variety of other talents, some just emerging. Before the book begins they have escaped from the School, where the scientists were keeping them in cages and torturing them with experiments, and have been living on their own.

The youngest of the flock, Angel, is recaptured, and the rest fly back to the school to rescue her. Now they are being hunted by Erasers, human/wolf mutants also created at the School, while they travel across the country, trying to discover the secrets of their origins and purposes.

Related Books:

Sequel
School's Out -- Forever

Books with Similar Themes
Animorphs series by K. A. Applegate
Shades Children by Garth Nix
Artemis Fowl series by Eoin Colfer

Related Web sites
Official Site
Author's Site
Fang's Blog
MySpace Page

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