Reading the entire wild and bizarre Maximum Ride saga

This is the text version of my video.

It has the same content, minus a few off the cuff things I likely said in the recording. I think I was delirious from heat, so who knows!

This is a review of all the books in the core Maximum Ride series, a full summary and spoilers. It’s very long!

Intro

Maximum Ride. These two words might just unlock very deep core memories inside you, and for good reason. Maximum Ride is a bestselling book series by a bestselling author about a Flock of winged kids escaping from evil scientists and wolfy shapeshifters. It was a smash hit that spawned manga, comics, and even a movie with a bizarrely famous name attached. A lot of people remember Maximum Ride, but memories begin to get… foggy about the later books.

You see, Maximum Ride is one of those series that people loved as kids but that soon became famous for other reasons. In hindsight, there were a lot of details that didn’t add up, and warning signs of what was to come. What was meant to be three books turned into eight, and that downward curve they were on soon turned into a straight dive to the bottom, and one of the strangest, most shocking endings you would not believe.

I was a fan of Maximum Ride for many years, picking it up in elementary school since Angels were my special interest even then. I read along with almost every release, but hit my breaking point most of the way through. So I decided to reread the entire series, start to finish, including the ending I’d never read before.

This is going to be that. I’m going to explain and discuss every book and every plot twist as we go, and follow the madness until the end. With a few intermissions to spice things up. Apologies I’ve been away, I’ve been doing this.

Let’s get going and see how long it takes.

James patterson

A very small prelude to kick us off, I want to talk about James Patterson, the author. Knowing him is pretty helpful groundwork for this series, and a surprising amount of people don’t know he’s responsible for the series.

James Patterson is one of the highest paid and most prolific authors in the world, in one estimate being the highest paid author for multiple years in a row. He’s written a ridiculous amount of books, well over 100, many of which are top sellers. His primary genres are thriller and crime, but after the success of Maximum Ride, he started dipping more into YA and Middle Grade.

Patterson collaborates a lot with other authors. And also people, seeing as he wrote a book with Bill Clinton once. Patterson publishes so much I doubted he was even a physical man rather than a pseudonym for a long time. It certainly remains a fact his frequent use of collaborators often is left off the cover, or even inside pages, of his books. Maximum Ride was pretty much entirely written with a woman named Gabrielle Charbonnet, who is thanked every book but never explicitly named as co author. It’s also very likely Patterson has used ghostwriters before, who write books according to a rough outline provided by someone else. We can’t necessarily prove it, but it’s pretty obvious.

Maximum Ride itself is a sort of ‘redux’ of two other books Patterson had written, The Lake House and When The Wind Blows. Both follow winged escaped lab experiments called Max, but the parallels end there. He wrote them for adults, but realised a version for a younger audience might work better.

What all this tells us is the foundation of the series to come. James Patterson, an author made of success, wrote a very successful kids series. It was meant to be a trilogy. It just kept going.

But first, book one.

Book 1: The Angel Experiment

It’s very easy to understand why Maximum Ride was a bestselling book and kept going as long as it did- it’s good. Not incredible or breakthrough, but it’s fast, light and fun. It’s perfect for its middle grade audience and rereading it as an adult was just as breezy. 

The character voice of Max is strong, commenting on everything with some quip or sass that delighted me as a kid. It’s first person for her but third for others, full of short sentences and not much description. Often Max directly talks to the reader, the book itself opening with a warning that reading ahead will make you too part of ‘the experiment’. There’s definitely a lot of odd dated details and language, but it’s snappy and easy. I won’t have too many quotes total, but to help set the feeling of the book, here’s an early bit of an action scene.

After that, it was like a movie, a bunch of superimposed images that hardly seemed real. I landed another blow, then an Eraser punched me so hard that my head snapped around and I felt a burst of blood in my mouth. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Fang holding his own against an Eraser- until two more ganged up on him, and he went down under flailing clawed hands. 

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Book one is quite solid, but there’s still warning signs. Especially with foreknowledge, there are countless dropped plot threads already. The structure is quick and reliant on cliffhangers. It keeps you reading, but you pretty soon learn half of the cliffhangers are bait and switch- constant freakouts that next page are nothing. The rest of the chapters are no better about the bait and switch either, as that is really Maximum Ride’s tagline. It will continuously and somehow increasingly become a series where every page there is a twist or reveal that is either forgotten or fake, sometimes the same concept being the subject of more than one twist, switching back and forth until you don’t know what is real.

For book one, this lack of plot fidelity is only being hinted at. People who read it will probably anticipate a great build up, cohesion to the madness, and those people will be disappointed. Eventually. But the thing about Max Ride is that it does just kinda work. You do want to keep reading and thinking it’s going somewhere, and only with age and hindsight is the ghost writing clear on the wall and plot so obviously loose spaghetti.

Let’s start the plot.

Maximum Ride is about a group of six mutant bird-children trying to evade capture from the evil lab that made them. Initially, they begin in the Colorado wilderness in a huge house fending for themselves. A scientist from the laboratory, which is known as the School, rescued them and took them out here. His name was Jeb, and he stopped appearing about two years ago. Maximum Ride, who is fourteen, is now the caretaker for the group. She’s the oldest by only a few months, but has a deep protective and self sacrificing streak as she protects her Flock. The others are Fang, the quiet and moody 14 year old; Iggy, the sarcastic and blind 14 year old; Nudge, the chatty and emotional 11 year old; The Gasman, the mischievous and innocent 8 year old; and Angel, the cute and mysterious 6 year old. 

They’re all a family and a unit as The Flock, having been experimented on by the school and tortured with medical mutations for their entire lives, mainly growing up in cages. Angel and Gazzy (or The Gasman, because his farts- I mean, yeah, I guess an 8 year old if pressed to name himself probably would) are blood siblings, but everyone else is unrelated. Fang and Max also have a bit of a romance thing. This can be a bit weird if you look at it in the family way where they grew up in a lab together, but I don’t think it’s that bad. It’s a found family, and Max and Fang together act as the leaders and almost parents. So I give it a pass, personally.

The Flock are mutants, with huge wings, hollow bones, air sacs, different blood- they are 2% bird and the oldest known living experiments from the School, which seems to be creating a wide variety of mutants for unclear reasons. The other successful kind of mutant are the Erasers, the generic baddies of the series- they are basically werewolf shapeshifters, who are grown in batches and look like fully grown movie star adults in a year or two, then die around the age of five.

Max and the Flock are having a normal time in their safehouse when suddenly Erasers show up and abduct Angel. Among the Erasers is one named Ari. Ari is Jeb’s son, and he’s 7- unlike the totally artificial Erasers, Ari was a normal child when Max last saw him, and now has been mutated. He’s now a man-sized shapeshifting killer, but he’s also still 7- and boy, is he going to be a tragic character, if you can’t already tell! Max, Fang, and Nudge set out to rescue her, leaving Iggy and Gazzy behind to watch the house. The School is in Death Valley, and they have no plan but know they need to save Angel.

As they are travelling, Max spots with her raptor sight a girl being bullied. It’s worth noting: all these kids have powers beyond just flying. Right now it’s mostly flying, but every book pretty much they gain some random effect. The majority of the time it’s only used once then forgotten. Starting out, all the kids can fly and have super sight, plus are extremely tall and powerful. However Angel can read minds, and Gazzy is a perfect mimic.

Anyway, Max spots a random girl being bullied and separates from the group to intervene. The girl is named Ella, she’s 13,  and she’s being harassed by some kids, including one who somehow has a gun. Max helps Ella, but is chased by the bullies through the woods, getting shot at and ultimately taking a bullet in her wing and back. Seeing no other alternative, she finds Ella’s house and risks revealing herself. Ella’s mom, Dr. Martinez, turns out to be a vet- fittingly enough. Dr. Martinez and Ella rock, by the way, by the simple fact they are kind. Maximum Ride is a very narrative, inner thoughts focused kind of book, full of sarcasm and one liners- and panic. The trauma Max feels at trusting others and around medicine feels suffocating, and these random strangers become her first real encounter of trustworthy, kind people. It’s really nice, you know, to sometimes read about someone very hurt being cared for for the first time. Dr. Martinez doesn’t call the cops or act shocked by Max’s wings, she buckles down and helps her. When taking Max to her clinic to get some x-rays done, she’s protective and smart. 

Sorry, I just always loved Dr. Martinez, even as a kid. It was fun to read about the horrors of these mutant kids with sick powers, but I always really just wanted them to be safe and okay.

Spoilers, they won’t be, ever.

Dr. Martinez finds Max has a small microchip implanted into her hand, but it was inserted at such a young age she doesn’t think it can be safely removed. Max heals very quickly, and after two days departs, but we’ll see these two characters more later.

Meanwhile, Fang and Nudge are hiding in a canyon among hawks. Fang studies how they fly and communicate, while Nudge worries if Max is dead. Nudge also knows she once saw her name and an address in an old School file, and that the address is nearby- Nudge wanting more than any of the flock for a normal life, she flies off there to find her mom. She sees a woman she’s not sure if she looks like, disappointed that she looks plain and is smoking, but then the Erasers attack. The Erasers attack like every other chapter, sometimes, so though it’s unclear when I skip bits of the story, you can always add more Eraser attacks. They fill every empty space in the story. Nudge and Fang are then taunted with the message that they are the only two of the flock still alive.

Meanwhile at the house, Gazzy and Iggy are upset about being left behind and conspire to protect themselves with traps and bombs. They set up an oil slick for a truck and send it crashing, but it only attracts more attention. Attacked by more Erasers, they set off a huge explosion and flee to join the others.

The Flock regroups now near the hawks and sets out to find Angel. Max, Fang, and Nudge are soon captured though and brought to the School. Angel has been being experimented on meanwhile, hearing the thoughts of sadistic scientists who want to dissect her and partially mutant children doomed to die in cages and barely able to form full thoughts. It’s pretty grim.

Pretty quickly, Max learns our first big twist: Jeb is alive! She has long thought of him as dead, as the only good adult who protected them, but nope, he’s fine and working at the School. Being mysterious. He informs her this is all an experiment, that she needs to play along, and that she was made with a purpose- to save the world. This is a fact every other book in the series will repeat, but it’s in truth meaningless. But we’ll get to that later.

The Flock sans Iggy and Gazzy is brought out to the outdoor training yard, where Erasers are trained to hunt and tear apart live prey. They’re in cages, but it’s still pretty dumb to bring the bird kids outside, and it’s unclear why they were brought here- they soon escape. But like, what was the lab going to do? The Flock are their most important, most successful experiments. No way they were going to let Erasers tear them up. But then if you question that, you quickly start to realise how flimsy the School is in general. There’s no sense of realism to how it functions, it’s just an evil factory. They make hundreds of Eraser babies but can’t recreate six long lived winged kids, they constantly improve the Erasers but the Flock is always better. They are deeply inconsistent with their creations, some of them perfect hybrids while others are like Akira-style living blobs… What are they trying to do? What are they honestly trying to test and create? We can’t really ask that question, because there is no answer.

Iggy and Gazzy descend with the hawks to free the Flock, and they escape. We’re halfway through the book, but it feels entirely like it was meant to end here. The books are all quite episodic, but it’s still surprising how disjointed the main plot is. 

The Flock flies away heading East, but Max is struck by a sudden headache and collapses. Angel reveals she read some of the whitecoat scientists’ minds and that there’s an institute in New York that might have more answers, but she isn’t sure the name. She also has learned that the Flock were born from human mothers, not test tubes, and a bit about their various parents. Max, though, she has no information on.

They fly to New York to look for answers, having nothing to guide them but the vague name of ‘The Institute of Living’. Max has several more headaches which seem to be more like seizures, and begins to see images and words in her mind. While sleeping in a homeless city in the sewers, a kid with a laptop approaches them complaining about interference— as his laptop is glitching out. The screen has the same images that keep flashing in Max’s brain, and a message to her appears. Then the Voice shows up.

This is really the turning point for weirdness. The Voice as a character, as a concept, is pure McGuffin, purely there to raise questions and be mysterious. Multiple characters are the Voice in Max’s head throughout the series, at least until that’s retconned. Maybe. The Voice when it first shows up is especially mysterious, almost supernatural. Mind reading, mimicry, and bird wings are all impossible obviously, but feel somewhat biological fantasy, ish. Max’s Voice projecting images to a computer is less so. Or the other stuff it does.

The Voice is just that, a genderless voice that speaks directly with Max, generally being mysterious about her destiny and what she should do next. It guides Max to FAO Schwartz, the old New York toy store, where she witnesses an ouija board moving on its own to tell her to save the world. This is something I’m fairly certain- writing this before reading the other books- never is explained and purely a one off spook. It’s hardly the only one, but I was surprised at just the ridiculousness of Max’s magic Voice controlling a planchette.

Angel sees a stuffed bear she likes and uses her mind powers to force an old woman to buy it for her. Add that power to the list. Not much later, Max gets a vibe and looks down, finding a credit card with her name on it. Angel gets her own vibe that the password is ‘mother’. The Flock use it to treat themselves to extremely tacky 2000s makeovers and food as they hunt for the institute. Oh, and Erasers keep attacking, remember that’s a constant fact. Ari has fake-died at least twice by now. That’ll be a running theme. After drawing attention by ordering too much food at a fancy restaurant, they flee by flying away in public and hide out on the beach for a while. Angel discovers she can breathe underwater. Angel is going to, by the way, get by far the most powers.

Fang is deeply injured by an Eraser attack and Max kisses him, starting one of the most drawn out romance arcs ever. The Flock finally stumbles around enough that, with the aid of the Voice, they find the Institute of Living and realise there’s a secret sewer basement. They break in, and Nudge gains the ability to touch objects and sense their history, allowing her to provide a computer password. They print off a bunch of files that seem to be about them and their parents, but Gazzy discovers there are also some cages down here with mutant kids and animals. 

The two little creatures asleep on their cage floor were clearly horrible failures and probably couldn’t last much longer. What with some of their vital organs on the outside of their bodies and all. Kidneys, bowels, a heart. Oh, the poor babies. […] I turned to see him looking at a large cat, like a serval or a margay. I’d never seen a real animal in one of the labs before. Just as I was wondering what its deal was, it woke up, blinked sleepily, then turned over and dozed again.

I swallowed really, really, hard. It had human ideas. And when I examined its paws more closely, I saw humanlike fingers beneath the retractable claws.

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I didn’t expect Maximum Ride to be what influenced my appreciation for body horror. Jeez. The Flock rescues the mutants and runs away, parting ways with the group as one mutant takes charge. Angel, however, keeps a small scottie dog named Total.

As they flee they again run into the Erasers. Max even comments at one point that the Erasers had an uncanny ability to always find them- and sometimes not find them for days. It doesn’t make much sense and it never will. Ari and Jeb are also somehow always there too. In the sewer, Max and Ari fight again, Ari revealing that while Jeb was looking after the Flock, he pretty much abandoned Ari, who is jealous that Jeb loved them more. Ari was only three when Jeb took the Flock and started caring for them, and three when the school mutated him into an Eraser. Dark stuff. Max snaps his neck by accident and he dies. This isn’t the first murder in the book, Gazzy and Iggy literally exploded several, but it’s pretty crazy to read about a teen murdering a kid. Even if the kid is an adult-looking mutant werewolf.

Ari though is fine- I mean, the guy has fake-out died more than once already in the book, and he’s revealed as back up and at ‘em like immediately book two. Still, Jeb hunches over Ari’s lifeless body and shouts at Max for killing her brother! Which, yes, there’s some parent reveals and false twists throughout but Jeb is Max’s actual father and Ari is her half-brother. To just lay that out right now.

The Flock escapes to head to Washington DC, where their files say their parents might be, and the book ends.

Book 2: School’s out- forever

Hitting the second book, I really remembered how much I enjoy this series. I loved it- My friends and I shared copies, and I would underline my favourite jokes and add annotations and doodles. We were buying the latest on release day- I remember exactly where I was in Barnes and Noble when I first read the fourth book and the shine began to fade. But we’re on book two, which was always my favourite.

Maximum Ride is fun, but the second book is still part of the growing descent into literary insanity that is this series, so the plot points begin to get sillier and sillier as even more plot threads are entirely dropped. I would love to keep a count, actually, of things that are brought up to no explanation, but it’d be extremely difficult. Some things do come back, but most do not. The pace is lightning quick and heavily episodic as before, a silly odyssey of nonsense with a couple surprisingly good elements. As much as I hate the bait and switch narrative and the way unexplained events are the primary way the plot moves, I really enjoy the Flock, and the book on a whole. I don’t like the overly sarcastic lead voice in adult fiction, but for a teen, Max’s sass is surprisingly enjoyable. There’s jokes I liked, and the way the characters act is quite in line for a bunch of messy mutant children. I wanted the best for them, and I felt real emotions both then and now for their plights. Golly!

Fleeing to the DC area to look for their parents from the mysterious printouts they stole from The Institute, the Flock soon bump into more Erasers. But this time, the Erasers have wings! They’re sloppily grafted and don’t work well, leading to the Flock beating them all, but Ari managed to hit Fang with a severe wound. The Flock is forced to go to the hospital for help

There, the FBI quickly shows up. They’re mutant bird kids in a medical place, it’s deeply suspicious. The FBI tries to say they have interest in the reports of these illegally made experiments, but the Flock don’t trust them. Then one agent, Anne, shows up. Immediately she’s likeable, even to the wary Max. Here’s her first scene, because it also really shows the style and tone of the writing.

“My name is Anne Walker,” she said. “And yes, I’m one of Them. I’m the one they call in when everything goes kablooey.”

“Have things gone kablooey?” I asked politely.

She gave a short laugh. “Uh, yeah,” she said in a “duh” tone of voice. “When we get a call from a hospital saying they’ve got at least two and possibly six previously unknown recombinant DNA life-forms and one of them is gravely injured, then, yes, I think we can safely say that things have gone kablooey with a capital ‘kuh’.”

“Oh,” I said. “Gee, we sound so important.”

One side of her mouth twitched. “Uh-huh. Why the surprise? Hasn’t anyone ever told you you were important?”

Jeb. The one word shocked my sense, and I went into total shutdown so I wouldn’t start bawling like the goofy recombinant life-form that I am. Jeb had made me feel important, once upon a time. He’d made me feel smart, strong, capable, special, important… you name it. Lately, though, he mostly made me feel blinding rage and a stomach-clenching sense of betrayal. 

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Anne makes a deal with Max to hide the Flock at her home while Fang heals, and generally lay low there. Anne would like to study them, noninvasively, and protect them. Max doesn’t trust her and the Flock is generally nervous, but they wind up agreeing. Anne takes them to her huge mansion on the outskirts of DC, and it’s… peaceful. Normal. Max especially can’t stand this, but the younger kids start to love it: they have separate bedrooms, hot showers, lots of land and farm animals to play with, a pond to swim in- it’s paradise.

I always really like the sections of these books where the Flock gets to just be kids and be taken care of. Anne starts to learn to cook and feeds them huge family meals, taking care of them by being both stern and kind- Max hates how she is sort of taking her place as the ‘mom’ of the group, but as it’s pointed out, Max is only 14. She shouldn’t have to be a mom to the Flock at all.

Also, Total the dog Angel stole from the lab can talk now. It’s weird how it happens. There’s a fakeout first where it appears Gazzy is using ventriloquism to make it look like Total is talking, and the book treats this as a funny joke. A talking dog, wow! But a few chapters later, nope, Total really can talk. Total has never been my favourite character, acting as a sort of grouchy new yorker comic relief, but honestly this reveal made me laugh. It got me.

Max thinks she hears Total talk, and this happens.

I felt stupid, but… “Can Total, um, talk?”

“Uh-huh,” Angel said casually, squeezing water out of her hair.

I stared at her. “He talks. Total talks, and you didn’t tell me?”

“Well…” Angel looked for him, saw he was pretty far away, and lowered her voice. “Don’t tell him I said this, but he’s actually not that interesting.”

[…Max goes to talk to Total…]

“Total?” I said when he was close. “Can you talk?”

He flopped down on the grass, panting slightly. “Yeah. So?”

Jeezum. I mean, mutant weirdos are nothing new to me, you know? But a talking dog?

“Why didn’t you mention this before?” I asked him.

“It’s not like I lied about it,” said Total, reaching up with a hind leg to scratch behind one ear. “Between you and me, I’m still trying to get used to the whole flying-kid thing.”

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Great. I enjoy this goof and I am in general surprised how many of the jokes in this book still played to me a bit. The book is from 2006, and there’s plenty of things that don’t land, but a lot do. The Flock often sounds like real kids and tweens and carries a strong joke, moving between horrible angst and teasing. Also, I read these at a very formative age— I bet they influenced my sense of humour along the way.

The halcyon days with Anne are still dotted with nonsense plot elements and twists, of course. Fang starts a blog. Max begins to look in the mirror and see herself as an Eraser- a hallucination that of course… say it with me… leads to nothing and means nothing. Woohoo! Ari being back from the dead is not addressed particularly either. The Flock spends a while looking into the files they stole from the Institute, but can’t solve what they mean… yet still there’s random fakeouts along the way. Using plainly the wrong code, they still find a photo of a baby Gazzy hidden in a condemned building. Inconsistencies like Nudge seemingly having a parent in the last book but having different parents in DC this time around are also left unexplained. The Voice continues to lurk in Max’s head, but it exists only as a plot McGuffin, sarcastically giving her vague advice about having to save the world and nothing else. As much as action is constant in these books, the actual feeling of the plot is very stagnant. Nothing actually changes.

Anne sends the Flock to regular school, because— why not? Plenty of times the series is so episodic the Flock does something only for the hijinks appeal. Everyone struggles to fit in, but the younger kids especially enjoy it, having never been able to just socialise with kids their age or feel normal. Even Max is surprised by the experience, agreeing to go out on a date with a normal guy. They spend a few months just being normal like this, and it’s a relief. They’re finding no new information on parents or saving the world, but they are just being kids for once. Some Erasers attack, because that legally has to happen a certain number of times every book, but they’re fine.

They even go on a class trip to DC. Nudge touches the Vietnam memorial and gets overwhelmed with object memory while Angel uses her mind control to meet the president, and even gets him to move a billion dollars from the military to education and homeless care. Max worries about Angel’s sense of ethics, but honestly, hell yeah Angel go get it done.

Every so often in this book we get Ari’s POV. Ari in the first book was a tragic character, but he was very much written oddly, acting more like an adult than a traumatised 7 year old. He was actually slightly creepy towards Max, at one point calling her feisty and beautiful… he’s still odd to Max, but he’s been entirely reframed. He’s obsessed with her, but now it is a firmly child-like obsession. He was three when his dad abandoned him to raise Max and the Flock instead- but prior to that, he’d always looked up to Max. His fixation on Max makes sense: the one constant he really has is his father choosing Max over him. He wants to kill Max, but increasingly he also wants to kidnap her and keep her for himself- to be his friend. The book one angle makes it feel still a bit creepy, but if you think of him as just a child, mutated horribly, forced into bloody conflict… then him wanting to just be friends with Max again and be wanted and not lonely becomes properly tragic. Ari is just tragic. I wish he was written better though. He’s a child soldier who thinks he’s all grown up and just wants to be loved. At one point a child thinks he’s wolverine and asks for an autograph and it’s the first time in his life he’s ever felt wanted. Oof.

Also, Ari has a Voice of his own. It’s not going to be explained, don’t worry.

While the Flock’s time at school is going well, they happen to see on TV a woman who looks like Iggy, discussing her son who went missing 14 years ago. Looking into it, they think it probably is his mom, and take him to his parents. His parents feel certain he’s their son, and a birthmark proves it. Iggy leaves the Flock to go be with his parents.

However, he’s back a few chapters later. This is both a tragic thing but inevitable, because Maximum Ride is a world of arrested development. Iggy’s parents seemed to be the real deal. They accepted he was theirs, that he was now blind. But when they found out about his wings, they wanted to take it public, put him on TV and interviews and sell his story. He couldn’t take being a freakshow and left. That’s all we really get of the story, but it’s sad because it probably isn’t a trick by the School or anything… Iggy really did meet his parents, and it just wasn’t what he wanted so he had to flee. That’s it, and that’s really the inevitable note for all the Flock: they’re too used to the chaos of hiding and the reality of being mutants to truly accept anything else in their lives.

At school, Gaz and Iggy have also stumbled upon a secret basement full of files. They overhear the principal making vague threats about secret files that have to be burned, and discover a mysterious tunnel. Looking into it, it turns out their school was not built decades ago but is actually only two years old, having once been a mental health hospital. What this means, why it matters, and what anyone is meant to take away from this is unknown. Max stumbles into a teacher’s lounge and sees three of them with tasers, prompting the flock to fight and flee from the school and Anne’s house. What exactly was going on here is never explained.

As they go to pick up Total from Anne’s, they see Jeb and the Erasers descend upon the place. Anne is arguing very crossly with Jeb, but as Max lands to intervene, she realises they know each other. Jeb reveals Anne is his boss. Anne says she has grown attached to the Flock as family, having even floated adoption earlier, but Max is betrayed and self-satisfied her paranoia was true, and the Flock flees.

Like the book before it, book two is strangely bifurcated. It feels like the school arc is one thing, and now the second half is a much less cohesive something else. Among the Erasers, Max has spotted a girl identical to her more than once- Max II. Yes, identical clones will be a running theme in this series. We even have Max II’s perspective, and her intense hatred and jealousy of Max.

The Flock heads to Florida, following the whim of Angel. Angel also reveals, quite late, that apparently at the School she overheard how the Flock was made as mutants to survive a coming apocalypse— one that is going to be caused by a company called Itex. Looking into it, they realise Itex is a huge conglomerate that seemingly owns and creates everything, they just hadn’t been paying attention. On the way to Florida, also, Angel realises she can talk to fish. She could read animal thoughts last book, so this isn’t new, but hey. Jot that done onto the list, I guess.

They find out the headquarters of Itex is conveniently very nearby and get ready to infiltrate it, not actually having a plan at this point. They barely know what they’re doing or why, which makes the plot feel listless. At a motel, Max is kidnapped and swapped out with Max II, somehow without anyone noticing.

Max is put into a sensory deprivation tank, and Jeb pulls her out to explain Itex wants to terminate and replace her with Max II because she’s a lost cause. Yes, to note, evidently the Flock was made to save the world or outlive the apocalypse by the School… who was making them because Itex, their parent company, was likely to cause the apocalypse. It’s slightly confusing how this information is framed, if they were made to stop Itex or as Itex’s backup plan.

Max II fails to act at all like Max as she leads the Flock to the Itex headquarters, following her orders to get them all captured and killed. The Flock doesn’t appear to notice anything is wrong, but it’s deeply obvious. They raid the lab and find information specifically on Nudge’s parents, which reveal they were killed after she was stolen from them. The alarms begin to blare, and Angel reveals they always knew Max II was fake, because among other things, Angel is psychic.

Max meanwhile has broken out of her tank and made her way to Itex, somehow able to follow the Flock by scent. She busts in and fights her clone, but ultimately doesn’t kill her, declaring to Jeb and the whitecoats that Max II is also her own person and Max won’t be controlled by them into killing a fellow victim. Gazzy sets off a bomb and they fly away, ending the book.

While I’m here reflecting on the second book’s plot, I want to stop and note something. Do you think Total is a human? This never crossed my mind as a child, but… the lab he was taken from seemed to be all human children experiments, as in general all School experiments have been. It’s said there’s animal only testing for sure, but we never really see it. At the same lab they got Total from was that cat with human eyes and fingers, suggesting some children wind up far more like animals than people. What if Total was once a human and just happens to now look totally like a dog? He can talk. He’s as smart as a person. He can cry, and does a few times. And shedding tears is a purely human trait. Like. Dogs do not cry tears. He also eats chocolate and loves pop culture. He knows so much about France.

This is just a conspiracy theory that isn’t true… but it’s funny fridge horror. Mainly because Total later marries a completely normal dog, and that makes it weirder than it already is.

Book 3: Saving the world and other extreme sports

Maximum Ride was originally going to be a trilogy, and it only slightly feels like that. The third book wraps up a lot of things, but leaves pretty much everything open- at the point it came out, I suspect the sales were good enough J Patz and his co-author knew there would be more books. Plus, giving definite answers and conclusions is just not something Max Ride does. This is the series of dangling threads and it will only be downhill from here.

The first chapter of the book introduces the evil plot Itex has, laying out the idea they want to reduce the world’s population by one half. However, this extremely important plot point is altered in various ways as the book goes on, so it is unclear if they mean to cull the population by one half or by like, 90%. Certainly it’s genocide though, just a very poorly planned one. Itex seems to desire a eugenic genocide to ‘evolve’ humanity to survive through some apocalypse, while also being the pollutants causing the apocalypse, while also selling mutants and robots to other countries as weapons. Are they ending the world, or surviving the end? Are the other nations cool with Itex trying to kill billions of people as long as they get robot armies? Unclear. Itex is very much a generic big bad guy company existing only to be evil. 

This book sets up the idea of ordinary kids being able to stop the global war crime corporation with protests and riots, but the company is so removed from reality it doesn’t feel like an inspiring message. It’s cool a bunch of kids get to stop Itex, I guess, but the lack of cohesion in Itex as a whole means it can’t be inspiring. This isn’t a guidebook on how evil companies work and how to stop them, and Itex is not a metaphor for eugenics or facism or pollution, it’s just this vague blob of evil that can’t translate into real life.

At the start of the book, the flock is aimless in their mission, as usual. The Voice informs Max that Itex has retired all Erasers and all their experiments in general. This doesn’t make any sense, of course— Itex at no point shows the readiness for armageddon where they would no longer need their wolf army.

A chapter or two later, however, the Erasers… are back! You can pretty much count on every twist in Max Ride to be undone at some point or another, and this is one hilariously fast turn around. It turns out though these are robot Erasers, dubbed Flyboys.

On rereading, it is pretty weird how Maximum Ride exists in a world with both highly successful but unreplicable genetic mutants AND extremely high tech robotics. It feels like one corporation shouldn’t have both. Maybe the mutants would be better if they’d focused on just them, you know?

Fang and the others want to stop playing the game of the School and find a safe place to settle down. Max is reluctant but agrees, and Fang and her go about looking. While searching, Max and Fang kiss again. Meanwhile, the rest of the Flock is captured.

Max and Fang wind up in Arizona, at Dr. Martinez’ home. Max insists Dr. Martinez remove the chip from her hand, even though it’s risky. While high on painkillers, Max confesses she loves Fang. The romantic arc between the two is obvious— Max and Fang both love each other— but never actually resolves in this book… and will take many, many more books before it does. Though Dr. Martinez removes the chip, Max’s left hand is damaged and she is unable to move it.

Also, the Voice is still in her head, confirming it isn’t the chip. It might as well be supernatural at this point, the Voice, as it truly is never established how it functions. At Dr. Martinez’ house, Fang finds a photo the Flock once found of baby Gazzy hidden in her bookshelf, fittingly stashed between one on birds and human experimentation. Not very subtle, that. The book will get to this plotline much later, but I should address it somewhat now: Dr. Martinez turns out to have been involved in the creation of Max.

This makes no sense and is an obvious retcon.

In the first book, Dr. Martinez represents Max’s first experience of a home and a mother, especially as Max acts as the mother to the Flock. Dr. Martinez doesn’t freak out at her wings, but that is seemingly because she is a kind, smart adult- she can tell Max is in Some Shit as she doesn’t want to go to the hospital or call the police. She knows Max is in some trouble and knows as an adult she should be non judgemental and caring without pushing her obvious boundaries. She finds out Max is a bird mutant. I think any of us would have some sense to swallow the reaction and not freakout.

Here in book three, the whole thing is heavily recontextualized in the most confusing of ways. Dr. Martinez explicitly created Max, and the Flock in general to a degree. Seeing Max, the same age as that experiment she worked on before she was fired— it’s not like there’s droves of bird kids out there. She would have instantly known. The book says she ‘wasn’t sure’. But more importantly, the luck and odds involved are ridiculous. Max found Dr. Martinez’ daughter Ella being bullied by chance, and by chance stumbled upon Dr. Martinez’ house— the house of the woman who made her. What are the odds?

There’s a number of things in the books that are implied to be set up by the School or Jeb. The inexplicable credit card the Flock finds in New York under Max’s name was probably just planted because they have been tracking the Flock, and most of the random events were likely secret ‘tests’. But Max finding Dr. Martinez was so random the notion she was meant to, and that Dr. Martinez has a link to her- I do draw the line there.

Anyway.

Max and Fang leave, but find the Flock has been kidnapped, and it isn’t long before they are also kidnapped. They wake up tied to hospital beds inside the School, but Angel is missing. The whitecoats inform them that they’re at the School, but also that they never left. All of the last two books have been a dream.

Yes, really. In fact, the scientists then go on to say the Flock’s time in Colorado with Jeb was also a dream, which contradicts their own timeline of the dream being five months long. Max realises her left hand works again and her scars from the surgery are gone. Total, who they saw on a bed, is missing. Angel has seemingly betrayed them because she thinks she should be leader.

The book really tries to keep you going about this horrible dream twist. Obviously it’s a lie, but they keep you going for a while, in ways that don’t even make sense. Max’s hand working again might be because the School has advanced science, sure, as could be her scars healing… except later her scars reappear like magic. I’m really not convinced magic isn’t real in Maximum Ride, as it’s the only way to comprehend some of the things going on. For example, seemingly to randomly taunt the Flock, the scientists bring out the same photo of baby Gazzy with his apparent mom, but the photo begins to zoom out and spin, showing images not in the frame and revealing Gazzy’s mom sold him for 10k. Maybe. I mean, it’s probably a lie, but who knows at this point?

Also at the School is Ari. All the Erasers have been ‘retired’, but because Ari is due to die soon anyway, they let him live. All the experiments evidently have an expiration day that manifests as a neck tattoo when the time draws close, and Ari has like a month less. He is over his hatred for Max because he is terribly depressed. He is also seven, just to remind everyone. He is literally seven years old.

A man named Ter Borcht, seemingly head of mutant making, shows up to talk to the Flock. He explains in an annoying phonetically written accent that Itex plans to cut the world’s population with their Re-Evolution or By-Half plan, which will result in a world population of under a billion. They really aren’t very good scientists, these lot. Specifically, they want a world of only useful people without illness or weakness, and the Flock are deemed ultimately as failures. They are considering selling them to China as weapons though. The Flock irritates Ter Borcht enough he sends them out to be killed in a field. I really don’t get why the School always decides to execute the Flock via open air spaces.

Max reveals Angel isn’t actually a traitor, despite even her internal thought processes sounding like Max was shocked by the betrayal. This is the kind of book that just lies to you. Max and Angel instead made this fake betrayal plan just in case, and with Angel’s help they escape. Ari helps, and Max calls for him to come with, as she has become sympathetic to him.

Fang, however, is pissed off Max has done this and the Flock in general isn’t pleased. This leads to them splitting up, as they also have different ideas on what they should do to save the world— Fang thinks his blog might do something and wants to go to People magazine to spread the word. Max wants to go investigate Itex overseas.

Fang, Iggy, and Gazzy head west, while Max, Nudge, Angel, and Ari go East. They actually spend the rest of the book in these two groups. Max though is the only one who actually does anything- dividing the Flock makes the already episodic plot even more so, with a lot of the page count being taken up by silly adventures that don’t contribute to anything in particular.

Fang’s crew goes to LA, barges into People magazine, and is kicked out, with Fang not even thinking of showing his wings to keep their attention. They sulk around as Fang writes on the blog he started last book, talking very openly about exactly who he is, where he is, and what’s going on with the Flock. Pretty bold for someone being openly hunted to death. Kids around the world though are motivated to go take on Itex, and Fang even emails them all- as in, every kid in the world somehow- with a bold call to action. Except his call to action is less a plan on how to save the world and more a vague cry that Kids Can Do Stuff Too and Itex is evil.

Max’s squad meanwhile is in Europe. Amongst tourist activities, they learn Itex’s headquarters is in Germany. The Nazi parallels are not subtle, but extremely toothless- as much as Itex craves global genocide and eugenics, the message is very fuzzy on how that is bad. Which, I know, is obvious to a degree, and the book relies on that, but what I mean is that it is no deeper than evil. To really talk about evil I think we need to understand it not as evil but a series of bad ideas, and Itex exists entirely as the final stage of those bad ideas. At one point the propaganda of Itex states the new world must be pure, without ‘unnecessary’ flawed people, but also that races and genders will all be equal. The mutants at Itex are literally goose stepping, but the philosophy they follow is vague- and without specifics, it seems impossible to fight or counter.

Obviously Maximum Ride is no place to learn about the Holocaust or genocide. It’s Maximum Ride. But the book is actively invoking the language and imagery of Nazi Germany but then weakening and obscuring it. Kids books very much can and do have very dark themes and can serve as a way for kids to learn about and feel more confident in the face of dark times, but the way Itex is handled, I’m not sure what the takeaway is meant to be. Very often, it seems like it’s about pollution instead of like, killing all disabled people. I’m not a fan of watering down facism like that to ignore the ableism in favour of the ‘easier’ topic of pollution.

Anyway, Max’s crew is captured while infiltrating Itex, not before sending Fang an email asking for help. While held there, they meet The Director of Itex. The Director introduces herself as Max’s mother. Immediately there’s recognition, as she looks a lot like Max, and even talks in a similar tone of voice. Jeb is there also, vaguely trying to help while being a bastard, as usual. It’s worth noting Jeb probably talks to Ari like, twice in the series and primarily ignores his son. I hate Jeb, and we should all hate Jeb. Jeb reveals he is the Voice, speaking exactly as it does but out loud. This reveal makes… a bit of sense— the Voice and Jeb talk alike and have the same nonsense goals for Max saving the world. However, it will be retconned later in the series, and it’s never explained how he projects his voice directly into Max’s brain and knows whatever she thinks.

Max and Ari further reconcile while trapped in Itex’s dungeon. They are let out to exercise every so often in a large enclosed yard with hundreds of other experiments, including Max II and newly revealed Nudge II and Angel II. We have always been told the only successful mutants were the Erasers and Max, but again there’s tons of them here, and evidently every day Itex kills a few hundred.

The Director takes Max to be assessed by Ter Borcht more, as well as some Chinese scientists who are interested in their capabilities. I’m going to call the ‘Selling The Flock To The Chinese’ plotline ‘A Bit Racist’ and leave it there.

Jeb reveals to Max he is her father. People somehow following the plot so far may remember that was made clear at the end of book one, when he yelled at Max for killing Ari by saying Ari was her brother. Despite this, Max didn’t really think of it at all in book two, or up until this point. She is floored by the notion she is his daughter, and Ari is indeed her half-brother. Jeb also reveals The Director is not Max’s mother but rather likely ‘thinks of her as her daughter’. This is contrary to the fact they look and act alike and The Director talks quite a bit about how she gave up her only daughter Max to research and all- but you know. This book series will just lie to you.

It turns out Max’s real mother is Dr. Martinez. Straight up, Dr. Martinez worked at Itex with her vet knowledge and donated her eggs, but was fired before she ever saw Max really be made. This is a very strange situation when you think of it. Beyond me pointing out how inexplicable it was Max randomly stumbled into her creator and mother. Dr. Martinez donated some eggs, and Jeb, her coworker… fertilised those eggs? Isn’t that extremely weird, no matter your interest in science, for your boss specifically to fertilise your eggs? Sure, someone has to, but ethically speaking a random selected donor makes more sense. Rather than again like, your boss that you know.

Itex takes the group to a rally, where a bunch of international representatives are observing. It’s basically a weapons show, as Itex shows off all sorts of crazy sci-fi inventions and experiments that will never occur in the book series again. Among them is the ‘next stage’ human, a boy named Omega. The Director uses Max as an example of a previous experiment and point of comparison, making her test against him and fight him. Max though points out how stupid it is and even beats him at one point, which isn’t a great look for Itex.

Angel stirs up a riot among the crowd of mutants made to watch this. Really not safe, by the way, putting hundreds of mutants slated for death in the audience of your international arms show. Fighting breaks out, and Ari suddenly dies. Not from combat, he just expires. Jeb rushes to the son he abused for all these years and cries, telling Max how to best Omega’s secret weakness.

As the mutants riot, from outside the gates a bunch of kids also show up to riot. They begin pelting rocks over the walls and one girl drives her car through the gates. Max takes The Director and flies her into the sky to shake her down for answers. Not useful ones, mind, mainly to confirm Dr. Martinez is indeed her mother. Also, The Director reveals she is 107 years old because she is part Galapagos turtle, an inexplicable detail that at the very least does confirm she’s a straight up Nazi.

Max doesn’t kill her and they leave.

Notably, of course, Fang and his gang really doesn’t do anything. They try to go to Germany to help but don’t manage it, and just regroup in the epilogue. Ari is not mentioned after his death, but Jeb is just forgiven. Apparently his excuse is that he was just helping them in secret the whole time, avoiding being caught by The Director, and he’s sorry. Sorry just doesn’t cut it. He strictly doesn’t harm the kids more than psychologically with his betrayal, but what he did to my boy Ari is an unforgivable crime. Yet in the epilogue, he’s just kind of awkwardly there as the Flock reunites at Dr. Martinez’ home. Fuck Jeb.

The Flock then flies off into the sunset, basically, vaguely saying they might be back and have to go save the world more- as unclear as they have always been on what exactly they’re up to.

Reflections on trilogy

The first series of books is slightly good. Not good-good, not great. I wouldn’t recommend it to adults, but a kid of the right age can still have a blast. It’s downhill from here.

However, despite my genuine enjoyment and nostalgia for revisiting a series I know so well, I should say it isn’t like, a very steep hill we’re heading towards. It’s not like the first trilogy was a work of art and the downfall came out of nowhere. As said, it’s a very rickety roller coaster built on cheap twists and episodic skits. It simply doesn’t hold up under any deeper evaluation. You shake it and it falls to pieces and leaves you a bit annoyed.

It’s also notable that it fails in many specific ways books ideally shouldn’t. The plots are slapdash, yes, but the characters are too. As much as the joys of the series is the close-knit flock, they are extremely static characters. I write this with foreknowledge, too. The entire cast is limited to one or two patterns of behaviour and just repeats that, not really learning anything new or developing. This is especially true of side characters like Nudge and Gazzy, but even Max is a very static figure.

It’s also worth talking about some of the dated jokes. Mostly, a surprising amount of the jokes kind of hold up. They’re silly and dumb, but they’re fun. A few are however really dated in that cringe inducing way. ‘Schizo’ is used a fair amount, like once a book, just to mean crazy, just as anorexia is also used as a joke once. I’ve talked about this as it’s pretty common in bad YA para-ro books too: I really hate language about health disorders being used as insults or casual slang. Back in the day people really weren’t as tuned in to the idea that maybe jokes about eating disorders or mental illness were actively harmful. So. That’s uncool.

Max’s inner monologue, I also noticed, is quite odd. She makes a lot of references to things I don’t think a homeless mutant 14 year old would know, and in general the Flock and Total sling out a surprising amount of dated pop culture references. And I mean dated like, old for the 2000s. Max at one point references Baryshnikov, a soviet ice skater from the 80s

Overall though, the first trilogy is a strong set of books for what it is. Of the time, lacklustre, but enjoyable enough. Now it’s going to get worse.

INTERMISSION MOVIE

But first, a movie.

Maximum Ride, like most YA series from the time, was optioned for a film. It actually was first announced in 2007, before the big wave of failed YA adaptations, but was trapped in development hell for ages. This is pretty common— pretty much any YA series from the 2010s will have a similar stub on its wikipedia page. This is because film adaptation rights are often sold along with publishing rights, and then bought up by studios ‘just in case’ the book is a success and they want to pursue production. This is what happened with Lightlark, for example: the film rights are often sold but rarely actually followed through on.

Maximum Ride was a huge success, so its film adaptation had more progress than most. There was a writer and director attached by 2012, but no news on if it’d ever enter production proper. Especially when the writer then died in 2013. This probably would have been, and should have been, the end of Maximum Ride the movie. When you think of it, it’s both perfect for film with its snappy action and dialogue, but also doomed: the effects budget would be super high and flying is notorious for looking goofy on film. In all honesty, I think Maximum Ride is one of those things that would be far better suited to being animated. I think that about a lot of things, but c’mon.

The Maximum Ride movie then languished in the forgotten depths of failed early 2010s movie adaptations. No one was paying attention. No one really cared by 2016. We had other things on our minds… which is why a movie trailer dropping felt like a prank. Maybe something fan made.

But it wasn’t. No, in 2016, Maximum Ride released a movie adaption. Not to theatres, so it’s very very likely most people have no idea this thing exists. It is entirely official, but feels like a fan film. It is very bad and not even in the way that is particularly fun to discuss. It exists.

And um, there’s a very odd name attached.

The film really isn’t worth a watch. The most notable thing about it are the flesh slits they opted for to hide the wings. These are gross but interesting, I hate them but dig them a little. Otherwise, the movie adapts the first half of the first book loosely in the most boring way possible.

It’s hard to understand how the movie happened. There’s very little information out there about it and up to its release. It sort of appeared one day on the internet and that was it. And honestly, that is about all there is to say about it. It exists and that is it.

Oh, and Jenna Marbles made it. There’s that.

Jenna Marbles is, if you don’t remember her, one of the original top youtubers. She wisely left a few years ago, but her videos are still rather enjoyable, comfortable fun. She mostly vlogged and did funky little projects, and had some alien entities disguised as dogs. 

Her link to the Maximum Ride movie is a mystery to me. Looking into it reveals very little information beyond her attachment as one of the executive producers. It’s not like she made a video about it or spoke on the subject as far as I can tell. She’s just linked and I have no idea why. It’d be like if… I don’t know, Hbomberguy produced the warrior cats movie in 2020 while we weren’t paying attention.

If anyone knows more about Jenna Marbles and Maximum Ride, I am begging you to tell me.

Book 4: the final warning

What happens when something meant to be a trilogy just keeps going? And going?

Well, we have this book. In fact, a lot of people’s memories of Maximum Ride live in the series post the first three, because it’s hard to forget the crushing disappointment of just how bad the later books are. You might recall liking the first three, but the feeling of book four is much more memorable.

Book four is called ‘The Final Warning’, and it is ridiculous. It’s really hard to explain the feeling of this book if you haven’t read it- it is empty, random, and nothing. Maximum Ride is a book series that lies to you, and by this point I think it might be a series that actively hates you.

The book starts by establishing a new bad guy: The Uber-Director. Previous bad guys, like the Director, were never given much depth but the Uber-Director is even shallower. He has an army of robots- not the Flyboys of the last book- and his plan is to abduct the Flock in order to sell them. The logistics and logic of this is not really expanded upon, and the UB declares his intent to auction them long before he even has them captured. His links to Itex and the worldbuilding as a whole is not expanded on, and he dies by the end without having achieved anything. I am talking about him a lot up front, because he’s barely in the book.

To be fair though, there is hardly anything in the book. Maximum Ride constantly is a story pushed by random events and lacking any coherence, and that’s all the more obvious in this book.

At the start of the book, the Flock is burying Ari in the woods with Jeb and Dr. Martinez. Jeb being allowed here seems constantly wrong, but the Flock has accepted him- somehow- as trustworthy. After all he did, including actively cause the death of his 7 year old son with his abuse, Jeb is now like an awkward reformed villain dad. That’s a great trope, except Jeb isn’t reformed. He’s just around.

Dr. Martinez and him have arranged for the Flock to talk to the government in D.C.. Exactly why isn’t really clear, and no one involved seems to know. The government officials they talk to seem to vaguely want to study the Flock, or send them to an actual school. The Flock doesn’t want to do this, and that night someone sends them a bomb inside of a pizza. The pizza bomb is never explained. It’s just that kind of book.

Oh, and also Nudge is now magnetic and Iggy can identify the colour of things by touch. Almost everyone gets a new power in this book, and none of them are actually used to do anything. Almost all of them are not mentioned again after this book.

 It’s always such an annoyance when characters who suddenly gain powers don’t figure out the limits or actually ever use them, and Maximum Ride is one of the worst offenders of that.

Max’s Voice chats to her, but this time the Voice states it is not Jeb. Quizzing Jeb on the matter, he says he ‘can do’ the Voice but ‘is not’ the Voice. And that it’s part of ‘the bigger picture’. This is code for it being a meaningless twist that will never be settled.

The Flock goes to another government meeting to no result, and then heads out to fly aimlessly. Fang discovers he’s invisible if he sits really still, and he and Max kiss again. Their relationship drama is an increasing theme, and it is entirely a series of scenes where they kiss and then Max flies suddenly away— or they bicker about jealousy.

The Flock feels directionless without a goal to work towards. The book does too. Angel reveals she can now shapeshift, though only has two forms: a black girl and a bird of paradise in human shape. Cool. The Voice in Max’s head begins to direct her to a specific spot and informs her that Dr. Martinez is there, so off they go.

Meeting again with the adults, Dr. Martinez reveals she has something for them to do. She doesn’t offer any more information, but these very paranoid mutant kids just accept and take a private jet to Argentina, and from there a car ride, finally arriving at a boat. Here they are told Dr. Martinez has suggested them for… an Antarctic mission.

You see, The Final Warning is a global warming book. It was about the same time as An Inconvenient Truth, and rather feels like J Patz and his co author had just seen that movie and decided it’d make a good book idea. It does not.

Iggy asks in chapter 31, as we near somehow halfway through the book, “What the heck is global warming?” And so the interchangeable scientists on the research vessel explain. Max, hilariously, doesn’t believe in global warming for the majority of the book.

The Flock takes a boat to Antarctica. On this boat, Fang hangs out with a 21 year old researcher who seems into him. It’s just here to make Max jealous and add drama to the romance, but it’s a notable point, because like. That scientist is an adult who seemingly is mutually into this 14 year old boy, even though they do not engage in any sort of romantic activity. Iggy discovers he can see the colour white if it is the only colour in the vicinity. Cool.

Also on board is a dog named Akila. She’s a malamute, and Total is instantly smitten by her. This raises so many ethical questions about dog romance. Mainly, is Total enough of a dog that this isn’t weird? There really isn’t a plot to this book, so let’s just talk about the dog romance.

Total bemoans the fact that Akila won’t talk to him ‘in the universal language’, whatever that means. Mostly, it confirms to us that he cannot communicate with this regular dog- there is no dog language uniting them, at least not one they share. He is still utterly smitten by her though. They both look like dogs, but really, at what point is Total not a dog? At what point does it feel like beastiality for him to be so in love with Akila? Later Total and Akila get stuck in an ice crevice, and Total has to ask Angel to use her ‘talk with animals’ ability to calm Akila down. These guys are not the same species and Total can’t talk to her. They should not be in love, but I know for a fact in one of the next books there will be a dog wedding.

Even if Akila was to later inexplicably gain the ability to speak, I’m not sure I’d find that any more comforting. I think Total is a grown man and he should not date this dog.

Anyway, the Flock arrives at Antartica. What use do a bunch of climate scientists have for some bird kids? No one knows. We only see one thing they actually do, and it’s to look at penguins with another researcher. They don’t appear to contribute at all, and the closest role they have is just that they’re media-worthy mutants and thus can be good advocates. They  don’t do jack otherwise.

While watching penguins, one of the researchers is grabbed and killed by a leopard seal. This sudden death would be quite grisly, but it turns out she was secretly a robot working for the UB. I couldn’t swear this character even had a line before her sudden death, and honestly the reveal she was a robot does not impact the book. What I can tell you is that around this same time it is revealed Total is growing his own set of wings.

Angel wanders off alone to try to pet a baby penguin with the dogs, and gets wedged in an ice crevice as said. In the middle of a blizzard. Max and Fang go looking for her and save her, but have to bunker down in the storm. While there, the UB’s henchman Gozen- basically just Frankenstein’s Monster- finds and kidnaps them. They’re brought to a warehouse where conveniently the rest of the Flock has also been captured, and they are taken to Miami.

So, yes, the Antarctic plot really was absolutely nothing. We are now hitting the end of the book, and I’m hoping this summary is making it clear how little has happened. In Miami, the Flock meets the UB as he starts up a video call with the despots of the world to auction the Flock off. It’s worth noting the UB is also a series of plexiglass organs stacked in a wheelchair, with a head attached, by the way.

The Flock being auctioned is really just another scene for them to crack jokes as dictators ask about their skills, and it’s identical to the several other scenes exactly like this in the series so far. The auction itself is such a dumb concept, and yes, to bring the word dumb into the world of Maximum Ride is a risky idea. It’s all a little dumb and we accept that. But the UB set up an auction of the Flock before he’d even captured them, and a bunch of evil people are willing to spend millions on these mutant teens who can’t be controlled or weaponized in the slightest. Like the ‘selling to China’ plot last book, the implication is that they’d be great weapons, and maybe they would be if they weren’t a bunch of rebellious children.

As the auction happens, a category five hurricane is hitting Miami. It’s off season, because you know, global warming and all. In fact, the hurricane hits the skyscraper they’re in and breaks the safety glass windows, allowing the Flock to escape. They tumble about before finding the eye of the storm to hunker down in. Akila is seemingly dead and lost, as she was abducted with them, but she tumbles out of the sky and lands on Max, fine.

Max spots the UB and Gozen being tossed about in the hurricane and flies up to drop kick them, ensuring their deaths.

Then we just sort of move on to after. Max admits global warming is bad and real and she goes to give a chapter long speech to congress about how bad pollution is and how America needs to stop climate change, and that’s it. The epilogue is that congress has apparently built a school for mutants despite the Flock rejecting the idea, and while they attend the opening, the Voice tells Max she has more work to do. So they fly off.

Gee. Book four. The Final Warning. This is really the book that tells any young fan to lower their expectations and yet it’ll still be only disappointment from here on out. Maximum Ride is a bestselling series, and I have to wonder how much money you have to make before you just give up so much and write a sequel like this. It’s not hard to imagine making Maximum Ride work as a coherent series. The trick, you see, would be to decide a plot ahead of time, pick out some twists ahead of time… and uh, write a good book. This is not what James Paterson and his ghost writers went with. They wrote The Final Warning.

Book 5: MAX (A Maximum Ride Novel)

I think something about The Final Warning was so bad J Patz and his crew- of by now I’m sure many ghostwriters- sat down and had a meeting about it. It still sold, obviously, but it sucked and everyone knew it. I think they took a big dry erase board and wrote ‘WHAT IF THE VILLAIN HAD A MOTIVE THAT MADE SENSE?’ and circled it like five times. Maybe they underlined the word ‘MOTIVE’. Maybe someone added ‘PLOT’.

Anyway, Max: A Maximum Ride Novel is okay. Its name is pretty silly. Every book has been called MAXIMUM RIDE with its title in smaller letters below, but MAX subverts that. From here on out, too, the next three books follow this trend. Character name: A novel. I remember when it first came out. I didn’t really understand what a novel meant— I still strictly don’t, because it can mean many things. I figured it meant it, unlike the others, was a more serious book. This wasn’t a book, it was MAX: A NOVEL.

I really don’t understand what it means, but I guess it worked on me, because I was again excited for Maximum Ride, thinking it might get good again.

On this reread, it is kinda. In many ways, book 5 feels computer written. It performs the task of a Maximum Ride book (or, Novel) but doesn’t stand out besides. If anything, I think this proves some turning point in the series, like J Pat moving to majority ghostwriting rather than personally working on Max Ride, but that’s just a baseless theory. A baseless book theory, weheheheh.

Max and the Flock are hanging out performing airshows to raise awareness of global warming and pollution. Yes, they are very much fully famous by now, but the world never acknowledges this. For the full first trilogy the world learning about mutants was slowly taking place, by now they are part of the CSM- Coalition to Stop the Madness- doing flying shows to sold out stadiums.

If the world learned tomorrow about real, flying kids, it would be madness and everyone would know everything about the mutants involved. Maximum Ride though wants to have the best of both worlds, as they are both advocates doing big speeches and somehow able to blend in with normal people, or surprise them with the wings. No one should be surprised by the wings by now. There’s mutant bird people and we have so much footage of them. It’s such a huge… discovery, I guess, it would be impossible to not hear of it. Yet they still seem surprised that someone from Hollywood wants to talk to them about movie rights.

After a cyborg with a gun for a hand fails to snipe them at an air show, the Flock becomes aware there’s a new batch of badguys around. These ones get dubbed Machine geeks, or M-Geeks. I think that is my least favourite name for baddies so far. They realise someone wants to stop what the CSM is doing.

What are they doing? Well… it’s just as low impact as the Flock’s fame. They hand out leaflets and cards educating people on climate change. I get the message, and it’s 2009 so man I wish the CSM had been successful, but it still is so lacking in purpose. For a book series about how kids can save the world or whatever, there’s very little information about direct action, or action in general. What are CSM’s goals? What can be done about pollution, what can people do and how can we pressure governments? Eh. They got infographics.

Max and the Flock go into hiding, again. Jeb approaches them with the idea of going to a normal school, again. This one is called the Night and Day school, it’s different from the school for gifted kids last book, and we again get no information about what it is like. It’s meant for gifted kids, for example- is that a euphemism for more mutants? Who knows! When the Flock later goes on a tour, there’s next to no information.

First though, Max goes out flying alone at night and is shot. She’s abducted by a man named Mr. Chu. He informs her he represents a group of very powerful and rich businessmen from across the world, who plan to outlive the coming apocalypse. He asks Max to join them, but she refuses, so he dumps her out of his car. Why didn’t he keep her? Very good question.

Max doesn’t explain her encounter with Mr. Chu to the flock, and they go check out the special school. While there, Nudge decides she wants to stay and be normal. This has long been part of Nudge’s story- I hesitate to say arc- but like all character arcs in the series, it’s very short lived. She cries about being a freak and wanting her wings cut off, and decides she will stay at the school, even if that means being left behind. Max realises she can’t force Nudge and has to accept her choice.

A fax arrives telling them Dr. Martinez has been kidnapped. A fax is one of the highest stakes ways to be informed of a kidnapping, by the way. The Flock needs to go find out where she is and rescue her, giving us a very blessed sense of cohesion in the plot. For once, there is a goal that is extremely concrete. First, obviously, they need to go beat up some M-Geeks. As said I often skip smaller story beats in this series as they are usually just a crowd of baddies showing up for a chapter, but in this case I need to note something. Inexplicably, one of the M-Geeks is a bad clone of Ari. Why? A cheap spook, I guess. It’s not Ari or a clone of him, just very similar looking, and he winds up dead with the rest.

They grab another private jet. For kids trying to save the world, who literally have wings, they sure haven’t learned how insanely harmful private jets are. On the jet, also, is Akila. This is one of at least two notable retcons from the last book, which ended with the implication Akila would travel with the Flock. She is a large dog and does not. The other is with the scientist Dr. Brigid, who was (maybe)  flirting with the 14 year old Fang last book: she was 21 last book but is 20 now. Either way, not a cool age gap, though they haven’t done anything.

Total is not normal about Akila, of course. Look at this quote.

Total breathed, stopping dead. He stared up at her [Akila] as if he were a starving man and she was a Snickers bar. 

Ch 27

See the issue? MAN. HE IS A MAN.

Okay, he’s not, but also I still don’t trust him. It’s not clear still if he can even talk to Akila, but they are basically dating, with marriage being proposed by the end.

The Flock heads to a base and learns Dr. Martinez seems to be being held on a submarine. They have footage which shows a huge flock of birds going crazy around a small boat, which then is sunk by a mysterious dark shape. Then, they have footage of Dr. Martinez being held hostage with the day’s newspaper, and outside the porthole is a piece of the broken boat with its name on it. Miraculous CSI skills there. They even zoom and enhance. Along with the footage is an ominous phrase that was playing extremely slowly in the background, a voice saying THE BIRDS ARE WORKING. 

The Flock is ready to go chase after Dr. Martinez and find her, but they are now working with the US Navy. Who makes them go through basic training, despite them being children ages 14 to 6, and also mutants. This is one of those episodic skit bits, where the Flock uses their skills and jokes to easily pass every test and kill time. It’s a sequence that has approximately appeared in most of the other books in the series, akin to the obligatory ‘Flock wisecracks to flustered bad guys’ scenes. Iggy at one point during this time makes reference to ‘His Echolocation’ skills while swimming underwater, and it’s not said sarcastically, despite being the first mention he has any of those. To be fair, it’s semi implied just by the merit of him being that ‘extremely perceptive blind guy’ trope.

Nudge returns randomly, saying she was worried about Dr. Martinez but loved going to school for a few days. Again, nothing can last in these books. Max and Fang have more romance drama, this time showing growth, as they go on a semi-date and kiss in front of the Flock. It almost feels like they’re finally together, but um. Things get so much worse on that front guys.

Angel begins insisting everyone in the Flock practice breathing under water, and that they will develop gills soon. She’s very defiant in this book, evolving more and more into being some sort of cryptic psychic child-god. As the Flock finally boards a submarine to look for Dr. Martinez, Angel more than once just climbs out somehow to swim freely outside it, flaunting her waterbreathing and fish talking skills. When the sub is attacked by M-Geeks, she somehow talks to them and convinces them to leave, a hint towards the future ‘angel is evil’ plotpoint that is never explained.

The Flock and the submarine achieve nothing really and flounce around a bit. Eventually they are struck by the giant sea monster, described like some vast mountain suddenly rising from nowhere to attack. And yes: it is a sea monster. I’d remembered this fact, but was still a little surprised by the funkiness of the sea monsters.

Angel gets a brain reading from the monster, and explains it isn’t like a person or alien or mutant, but had thoughts and intelligence, and just wanted to kill everything. I sort of enjoy a big creepy sea monster as a threat, and honestly hate how they’re wasted.

The scientists on the submarine crew reckon maybe the sea monsters are a result of radiation from somewhere in the ocean, and go looking. Angel jumps into the sea to free-swim again, and Max and others have to go looking for her. While doing so, Max gets lost in an underwater cave. Her flashlight breaks, and she gets attacked by an octopus. I think that’s my worst, highly specific nightmare. The octopus rips off her mask, but she finds Angel was right, and she can now breathe underwater. It turns out Fang can as well, but no one else. Yet.

They encounter the sea monsters again, who range in size from car to airplane. They’re covered in bumpy, pickle-like skin which is full of gashes and open sores, excreting at all times ooze. Really rather unpleasant. It’s unclear exactly what they used to be, and I kinda enjoy the deep sea horror going on with them. They’re these living manifestations of pollution and mankind’s hubris, which I’m into. Plus I love a gigantic, scary, gross monster.

The sub finds a bunch of barrels of radioactive waste, helpfully labelled ‘Property of the Chu Corporation’. The Flock realises he wants CSM to stop because they have been advocating against pollution, and if people cleaned the ocean they’d find his illegally dumped waste. It’s really not that exciting a plot, but WOW, I was floored by it. A Maximum Ride book giving any event a cause and effect? A villain that even vaguely is acting slightly logical? Astonishing.

Angel goes free swimming yet again. I think she does it like five times in this book at least. She gets apparently attacked by sea monsters, but reveals she has been managing to communicate, and the sea monsters are now friends. The largest one is named Gor, and they call their species the Krelp. Angel can talk to animals and read minds, but the Krelp appear to be fully sentient rather than her understanding beast speech. She notes, for example, most animals have pretty simple thoughts. The Krelp though are seemingly an entirely new species with full sentience, they don’t appear after this book, which is a total waste of potential. I love the Krelp.

Angel explains on their behalf the Krelp are genetic mutants from the radioactive waste, and they have been attacking boats because fishing boats have been damaging their eggs and babies. They’re all very sickly from the radiation and hate the Chu Corporation specifically. They’re eager to help the Flock. The ominous message of THE BIRDS ARE WORKING is slightly explained, but not really: When Max goes near the Krelp, she hears the Voice repeat the message several times, and later is completed to THE BIRDS ARE WORKING. THEY’RE WORKING TO HELP US.

The birds then may be the Flock, and the Krelp might communicate extremely slowly in… plain english, I guess, since it got recorded by the US Navy as such. Angel earlier says whales aren’t fun to talk to as they speak and think very slowly, and this might be linked to the Krelp being former whales who have developed some psychic droning powers.

Which as I type it out is ridiculous, but man, we’re talking sea monsters already. Them having low level psychic droning as a mutant evolution of whalesong is pretty cool.

Of course, the message THE BIRDS ARE WORKING was recorded long before the Flock ever showed up. It seems like it was the Krelp sending that message, but what did it mean then? I’m going to go ahead and throw out the idea the Krelp might be like. Psychic and able to see the future. That seems like the only solution that makes sense. Maybe the Krelp were literally being helped by seabirds earlier, who were hiding them towards fishing boats to attack, but that doesn’t explain why the second half of the message seems entirely based on the Flock.

 If you have Krelp theories, tell me. I’m all about Krelp life now and would love to hear people’s thoughts on these horrible suffering psychic pain tubes. My new best friends.

The Krelp know where Mr. Chu is and thus where Dr. Martinez is being held, and with their help Max and Angel go to rescue them. Mr. Chu has a secret underwater dome protected by a vast electric field, but the Krelp ram right through. They use their body ooze to melt the glass dome and collapse it. Max swims in to grab Dr. Martinez, who definitely is getting the bends, and the Krelp create an industrial strength ooze bubble for them to travel in back to the sub.

After the rescue, the book skips ahead, as it always does. There’s rarely falling action in Maximum Ride. The epilogue offers very few answers beyond the notion everyone is alive and okay- we don’t learn any more about the Krelp or Mr. Chu’s exact fate, or what is going to happen as a result of finding this illegal radioactive waste off the coast of Hawaii. The book just ends with Fang and Max kissing in the sky, happily. Oh, and Total says this. 

“Gotta go. Timmy’s in the well, if you know what I mean.” He [Total] winked and trotted off with Akila while we all tried very hard not to think too much about his last statement. 

ch 76

I haven’t felt the need to put a ton of quotes in this review thing- generally there’s little I need to illustrate I can’t just explain. But I sure do keep putting in Total being weird quotes. That won’t stop. Not until someone stops him.

INTERMISSION: MANGA

There’s a trend a lot of people have forgotten about, and it’s that time when every single YA series was having a manga-style adaptation. Maximum Ride included, and Maximum Ride very much: Whereas Hush Hush and Beautiful Creatures only had one volume, Max Ride’s manga lasted nine volumes and adapts up to halfway through MAX (A Maximum Ride Novel). Each volume of the manga covers half a book, and it’s….

Pretty good? Honestly, Max Ride is something that has always been episodic in nature, so the chapters and images over text style of a comic suits it well. The manga is a straight adaptation that alters very little, and I actually like it. It’s not perfect, because its source isn’t perfect, but the art is nice and the writing is faithful. I might still have several volumes of it at my parents house if my mother hasn’t donated them by now, and while the books are missing from my local library, they have most of the manga on the shelf.

The only thing I really have to comment about is Nudge. My poor girl Nudge. Always shafted by the series as the least important Flock member, the manga draws her in… a specific way.

Drawing dark skinned characters with much paler lips is a design choice you can see in a number of manga, actually, but it still rings as off to a western audience because of the parallel it easily can draw to racist caricatures of black people. There’s a big difference between say, the golliwog and how Nudge is drawn, but it’s hard not to feel a bit weird about this constant design choice. Especially since Nudge is also drawn like a teenage girl when she’s actually 11.

Eleven year olds can look like teens, since that’s the cusp of puberty for many girls, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t think it notable Nudge is drawn with the body of an older teen, especially since it’s a racist stereotype to sexualize and treat black girls as older than they are. Nudge has been a victim of this throughout the series though, her physical description the least consistent out of any of the Flock: her hair is usually in ringlets, but sometimes it’s curly or straight, and her skin varies from a full spectrum of food-adjective colours, her race sometimes hinted at mixed race and sometimes black, her skin tone deep brown to just tan.

It really is one of those things that isn’t a problem until it is. Like again, yeah, a 11 to 12 year old girl can look more like a tween, she can be into fashion and boys, that’s all pretty normal. But when we start to look at it broader and from the context of her being one of few definite people of colour, her appearance being inconsistent but seemingly sexualized seems more in line with stereotypes of young black girls rather than being ‘just how Nudge is’. And Nudge really is the character given the least importance in the Flock beyond Total, so it stands out even more.

Anyway. The manga is overall pretty good. It probably is worth reading more than Maximum Ride is, and it thankfully stops before the series is complete, halfway through the last book that is even a little bit good.

Book 6- FANG

With the sixth book, I was bracing the entire time for plot details I knew were coming… but they never arrived. This is because I’ve read book 7, and I had no memory of book 6. And that is perhaps not that surprising, having reread it.

FANG (a Maximum Ride novel!) is about as bland as Fang himself can be. I have little against Fang, but I’ve never cared for him either. I hate poor communication and he excels at it, and he’s just not that interesting to me. Plus, next book, he— well, we’ll get to those crimes later.

FANG as a book is nothing in particular. Notably, like MAX, it has a much slower structure and style than previous books, with far less comedy skit interjections or silliness. It might be appropriate to call MAX a transitional book between these two styles, as I suspect the rest of the series will be similar. It feels somewhat more grown up, with less sudden twists and more interpersonal drama. Maybe by previous critique it seems like this would be a positive change, but it’s not. FANG isn’t a very fun book. It drags, and it annoys, and it sows seeds I’m going to hate reaping.

We start off with the Flock on a volunteer mission with the CSM to Chad. They’re helping distribute supplies to refugees.

James Patterson, or by now his definite ghost writers, need to stop touching anything international. The guy can’t handle it. First we’ve had multiple ideas of China buying the Flock as weapons and stereotypes there, now we get to see Africa. Oh gee. It’s not so much that he has written anything altogether offensive, but it certainly is from a very American white pop culture viewpoint of international relations. A bunch of random people try to shoot at the flock from machine guns atop camels, and the only idea we see of Chad— which might as well be Africa, the country— is extreme poverty and HIV. 

It’s not like it is wrong to say those are problems, but this isn’t my first YA book to mention Africa once, and only from the exact perspective of AIDS. Remember Sweet Evil? The African love interest who was never treated as one because he was black, the born again Christian Nephilim who was the only character to inherit two deadly sins? The sins being Rage and Lust? The guy who once in the second book opened up about his history just to talk about how he wished he could return to his country to fight AIDS? Y’all remember.

So while the Flock going to a refugee camp is nice and all, it feels like just another case of thinking about Africa as a third world and nothing else.

While at camp, Angel meets a girl and brings her to Max. Angel cuts the girl’s hand open with a rock and then demonstrates her immense healing abilities.  We then cut to a scene where this girl returns from her mission to show off this skill, and it is revealed she is a lab experiment by Mr. Chu. This girl isn’t relevant after this though, barring her very stereotypical backstory given by someone once she’s left. I’ll just include it for the over the topness of it.

“Yes,” Patrick shook his head. “She used to have a father and four brothers. They’ve all died in the past two years, from either HIV or hunger or the outbreaks of civil war that keep happening. Now it’s just Jeanne and her mother, and her mom has been diagnosed with HIV.”

CH 8

It’s like HIV is something you can just breathe in in Africa, according to J Patz and co.

Angel informs the Flock suddenly that Fang is going to die soon. She offers no real information besides this, and Max even like, picks her up and shakes her over this. Max though says that Angel has never been wrong. I don’t think that’s true, but great- Fang death is something the book will now hold over our heads.

The Flock meets a billionaire named Dr. Gunther-Hagen who is the one sponsoring this refugee camp. He has this huge air conditioned tent in the midst of the camp, which is not a good sign. He introduces them to Dylan, an extremely attractive teen who will now be a menace to the rest of the series. Dylan is also a mutant bird-person, but he’s only eight months old. He speaks pretty robotically and doesn’t know much, but while this could be the basis for an interesting character, he was made only to be a love triangle leg… so he’s extremely boring. Max’s Voice informs her that Dylan was made for her, to be her soul mate and perfect other half.

At this point Max and Fang are officially together, openly kissing and cuddling, so the idea of a sudden new soulmate is not very welcome. It probably wouldn’t have been either way. I hate soulmates as a sincere trope, and Dylan doesn’t help. As much as Max luckily doesn’t fall deeply in love at first sight, all the writing whenever he does anything points out how attractive he is, how perfect. 

Dr. Gunther-Hagen, who is often called Dr. God or Dr. G-H for reasons soon clear, explains his interest in evolving humanity to the next stage for the coming apocalypse. I wish Max Ride villains would at least decide when and what this apocalypse would be, but like all of them, he’s very sure it’ll be soon. So he has an interest in human experimentation to find a way to make all of humanity mutants, and thinks of Max’s flock as key leaders for the future. He asks her to work with him to promote his ideas and she refuses. She goes to leave, but he stops her by standing in her way, flashing a syringe.

It’s another fakeout cliffhanger, but one of the wilder ones. He injects himself with this needle, and immediately falls down into a chair, where he begins to have a fit of sickness. Frankly, it sounds deeply awkward. Max doesn’t know what he’s doing, he’s just injected himself with some horrible illness. He begins to grow boils and rashes, but tells Max not to leave, as he then begins to heal, explaining how he’s invented these healing powers. He then, as if that wasn’t enough, pulls out a cleaver and cuts off part of his finger, which he then reattaches.

Definitely unsettling, Dr. God. Which I’ll be calling him, also, for the sake of brevity.

Max then leaves and tells the Flock they probably should leave. She sees that night Mr. Chu lead a bunch of refugees into a small first aid tent, where they disappear and never return. She’s sure, correctly, Mr. Chu and Dr. God are collaborating to experiment on the refugees here. She even calls it ‘Nazi-scary’, and that while some people might be success stories, probably a ton of them are dying.

Now the Flock came here to help, even if it was more raising awareness and a bit of volunteering, but they rather uncharacteristically leave. The book just skips after the decision and they don’t reflect on it again. The Flock caring mostly about self preservation makes sense, but for someone like Max who wants to save the world, or for kids who suffered from experimentation… it is very odd they don’t seek to inform anyone about what’s happening, or stop it. They barely investigate it. Yes, they were definitely in danger there, but so were the hundreds of refugees who have even less ways to fight it. As much as I think it’s fitting for the Flock to flee, the utter lack of care is out of character. They’ve done a lot of standing and fighting against slim odds for people before, but don’t blink about these refugees being left in the care of a mad Nazi.

They go home, because they secretly have a home now. The CSM built them one near the one they lost in the first book, and they kick it for a while. Max has randomly decided the Flock should be more self-educated, and assigns them school work, which everyone hates. They also dislike how much time Max and Fang spend together, prioritising each other.

Angel hands Max a disc Dr. God gave her, where Dr. God asks again for her to consider working with him, promising he can grow Iggy new, working eyes. This isn’t something that comes up again.

Max starts seeing an Eraser in her reflection, again, something from the second book that also led nowhere.

Jeb shows up at their house. Max and him immediately have a huge fight. A lot of this book here is trying to set up for the next big plot event by getting everyone to hate Max, and mostly it makes the reader hate everyone in this book. There’s far less levity in FANG, and far more petty squabbles of misery. Jeb has brought with him Dylan, also, as he says Dr. God and him know each other and it’d be good for Dylan to learn from other bird kids.

Max’s Voice continues to press the idea that Max should actually be with Dylan, not Fang. Specifically the argument is that Fang and Max are too alike and too focused on each other, while Dylan is designed to be her perfect match and balance. Fang is meant to go off and lead his own Flock, and all of the current Flock is meant to do this one day.

Dylan for his part, though, fits in fine. He doesn’t really do anything or understand anything, though he has an instinctive built in drive to be near and with Max. Otherwise he’s really, really not notable- I could get through most of this without mentioning him.

Max and Fang research in private Dr. God more, using Nudge’s computer powers to find secret documents about his experiments. Lots of cancer and agony, basically, plus many pictures of horrific human experimentation and suffering. This is all stuff they could say, print out and mail, but they don’t. They don’t do anything about it, actually.

While Max and Fang are getting groceries, the rest of the Flock is attacked by Erasers. Yes, they all died in book 3, but they’re back for this random fight. Even though the Flock has been split up for short bursts like, say, getting groceries a ton, the Flock is pissed when Max and Fang arrive late. Angel especially has been honing in on the idea she should be in charge as she is the most special, and she leads the notion that Max should leave the Flock as leader. And in general.

Again, this feels out of character. Maybe not for Angel, who is really going on her evil dangerous psychic child arc, but for everyone else. The Flock is a close knit family and always have been, and it doesn’t feel at all sincerely earned that they turn on Max and vote her out. Everyone but Fang agrees to this, and Max just… leaves. It’s so out of character. Fang soon comes to join her, splitting the Flock into two again, with Angel as the new leader.

Max and Fang go to Vegas and goof around, while Angel plans to go to Hollywood and goof around. Despite saying this, it isn’t as fun as even last book. Despite the series honed art of having comedy scene interjections that further nothing, FANG feels about as dour as the character it is named after. Fang and Max go to a casino and gamble, and Max suddenly gets a jackpot of three wolf heads and hears Dr. God behind her- but it’s pure fakeout. Then they go to Cirque du Soleil, where Max is grabbed by a performer apparently working for Dr. God to… kill her at Cirque du Soleil? But she just flies away and that’s it. They call Nudge, who informs them of Angel’s plan.

Meanwhile Angel has decided the Flock should go to a charity concert in Hollywood, and get proper agents. She refers to having her own inner Voice like Max which informed her about Fang’s death and has guided her actions. Before they leave though, the Flock is unknowingly poisoned by Dr. God with a mutation virus.

In Hollywood, they start to feel ill but think nothing of it. Then at a pre-concert party, they begin to get extremely unwell, breaking out in boils and rashes. Max and Fang burst in as some bad guys of some sort are circling the Flock with guns. Angel grabs a gun and points it at Max, using her as leverage to then force the attackers to leave. Though Angel uses her mind control to tell them to not shoot the Flock and go home, one randomly shoots Jeb since he isn’t part of the Flock.

Once the attackers are gone, Jeb and the sick Flock members are rushed to hospital. Jeb is fine, and explains that Dr. God has seemingly dosed the kids with an experimental drug to force them to evolve more and faster. Once it passes through them, it’ll be okay, but they can’t be cured or stopped. The Flock recovers and returns home, but immediately realises Angel has gone missing.

Oh, and of course, this mutation virus Dr. God has dosed most of the Flock with never comes back again. In fact, I don’t believe anyone even develops a new power for the rest of the series. 

Angel has left a note, explaining she trusts Dr. God and his ideas and doesn’t want to be followed as she goes to join him. She ends it by reminding everyone Fang is due to die soon, and that him hanging out with the Flock may put them all in danger.

Max flies off to Dr. God’s house and finds Angel chilling on a beach chair, absolutely fine. So she just leaves and reports Angel is okay.

Dylan talks to Fang about the note, and the idea of him being around may put everyone in danger. Dylan still doesn’t stand out as having any real personality or interesting tidbit to him, but it is becoming pretty clear he has a huge interest in Max and almost obsession with being around her and her wellbeing. He can’t help it, as it appears programmed to think of Max as his soulmate, but it’s not an appealing character trait. Bothered by the idea he might put the Flock in danger, Fang leaves a note that he’s going to investigate what’s going on alone.

There’s a lot of notes and poor communication in this book. You can understand why I find it extra annoying.

Fang flies over to Dr. God’s house to apparently get some answers, but is shot by a tranquiliser dart immediately and captured. Dr. God says he’s developed a new serum to help mutate humans into better humans and is curious what will happen if he gives it to Fang. He says it’ll help Fang mutate faster and stronger, basically what happened to the rest of the Flock, but different. Fang begins to have a poor reaction and starts to die.

Angel sees this and is horrified by the notion Fang is dying and Dr. God could do this. She’s very inconsistent, and as much as in a better work I could chalk up her trust of him to her being literally 7, Angel is a mind reader who this book has been wheeling and dealing like someone much older. She hardly acts like a child anymore, so her naivety about this isn’t very plausible. Plus, she’s psychic. We never get full details on how it works, but she never mentions reading Dr. God’s mind. Surely she should have known he was an untrustworthy mad scientist from his thoughts.

The explanation for her actions this book is two paragraphs of a rare internal Angel POV: simply, her voice told her Fang was going to die soon. The Voice told her the best way for everyone to survive was to have two flocks and split up. She felt having Max and Fang in the same flock was overkill, and that Dylan could just replace Fang and be with Max, while Fang stayed with her.

It’s a poor plan, and it doesn’t feel like much of an excuse. Honestly, it all just feels like flimsy writing. There may be a reason for that.

Angel sends Max a long distance psychic distress signal, and she flies over to the rescue. Max and the Flock then fight Dr. God and his guards, including Mr. Chu. Fang is dying on a bed at the same time.

Inexplicably, Iggy pulls off Mr. Chu’s head, revealing a small green lizard boy named Robert. This is not expanded upon at all. This is not mentioned again. Who the fuck is Robert. The Wikipedia page on Maximum Ride states Robert was Mr. Chu the whole time, but I don’t buy it. Still, we will never learn about Robert the lizard boy. WHO THE FUCK IS ROBERT?

Anyway. Fang dies, ish, but Max grabs a needle of adrenaline, helpfully labelled dangerous, and jabs it into his heart. He comes back to life.

The Flock restrains Dr. God to a gurney. Dylan picks up a needle and confronts Dr. God about Dylan being a person, not an experiment, and seems ready to kill him. Max tells Dylan not to, and Dylan looks about at Max, Fang, and Dr. God, before injecting himself instead in an apparent suicide attempt. I mean, technically the book just ends there, as we move to the two epilogues— Dylan injecting himself randomly, the end. But we do quickly learn he was fine, and it’s not addressed further for being such a dark incident.

The epilogue, the first one, is a long fake out about Max and Fang getting married. It is so heavily hinted at, from Max wearing white, to everyone telling her how lovely she looks, to her nerves, to her bouquet, to her walking down the aisle with Fang… before they step to either side and Total and Akila arrive. It’s their wedding. Total is barely in this book, by the way, but it appears to be a retcon that he can talk dog language and his relationship with Akila is healthy. I know better.

After the wedding, Max finds… sigh…. A mysterious note from Fang. In this one, he talks about how much he loves her but that he has to go. He says maybe he was putting the Flock in danger- which we know is wrong- and that maybe the Flock should split for survival purposes- a notion that is based on nothing. He says too that when he and Max are together, they’re too into each other, and that’s bad .

Basically, Fang leaves and has no good excuse but drama. He talks a lot about how much he loves her, but that he has to go. He plainly doesn’t have to go, but he does, asking not to be sought out but that in twenty years if they’re both still alive he will meet up with Max again.

The book ends there. It’s not a very good ending for a not very good book.

FANG came out in 2011, and I almost wonder if the surge of moody teen dramas about paranormal creatures had some influence on how moody this book is. Instead of Japes, we just have conflicts that feel out of character. Instead of character development, we have character decisions that are pretty universally seen as ‘poor’. FANG is sort of weary, trying to be mature but approaching that from entirely the wrong angle. I need to know more about the Krelp and Robert the lizard boy, not pages of romance drama and a love story so artificial one part of it was literally made in a lab to force a love triangle.

The next book though is the one I remember more. It was the last one I read. And boy. Oh boy.

Book 7: ANGEL

Angel isn’t actually that important to the seventh book, ANGEL (A Maximum Ride Novel). The course from the last book has been set, and ANGEL follows it steadily: the plot is slower, and the romance love triangle continues to take centre stage.

At this point, Maximum Ride is not very fun to read. There’s no non sequiturs in this book, barely anything weird or inexplicable in the hokey way of the first trilogy. Yes, it delivers a cohesive plot structure, but if the price we pay for plot is having no likeable characters or fun storylines, I’d rather stick to nonsense.

Fang is gone, and Max is moping about it. In the several weeks since the last book, Dylan has changed from a passive experiment learning to be human into full on annoyance. He spars and teases Max for her emotions and pins and kisses her without her consent. She’s annoyed with him, but he won’t leave her alone… as he even explains.

“Never, Max,” Dylan said. “I’m programmed to imprint on you. You know it. I can’t fight the urge to be with you, no matter what.” 

Ch 4

I’ve discussed soulmates before. I understand the romantic notion of it and appeal, someone perfect for you, some destined thing… people can like it if they want. Dylan is a bad soulmate though, and sums up my dislike of the concept. He has no free will or desire to have free will about this. Max doesn’t love him— yet. As his suicide attempt last book illustrates, he can’t even imagine life without a girl he isn’t even dating. It’s creepy, but especially deeply unhealthy.

It’s not explored really, how toxic Dylan is. It’s not his fault, sure, but he sure isn’t fighting it. I think it’s far more romantic and bold to fight fate, to pick who you love no matter what has been decided, but Dylan is a happy stalker, dependent on Max’s tolerance of him to want to even live.

Pretty famously, a lot of his behaviour in the abstract is common, toxic behaviour — if we haven’t ourselves, most of us know a story about someone putting their mental health fully in someone else’s hands with tactics like suicide baiting. Max and Dylan can’t have a healthy relationship if Max knows that if she ever wanted to break up, he might harm himself — that it is her potential responsibility to give Dylan attention or he’ll harm himself in her name.

Obviously in real life, and even for Dylan, it isn’t necessarily person doing this behaviour’s fault. But it is their responsibility. It’s generally the result of someone with extreme mental illness who hasn’t had the support needed becoming codependent on someone else for happiness. But it isn’t exactly cool for the person on the other end either.

Plus, it can very much be a direct abuse tactic, a knowing manipulation.

Basically, Dylan raises so many red flags I can’t even consider himself a contendable love interest. Plus he’s a jerk now without a real personality.

The Flock minus Fang are hanging out at Dr. Martinez’s house when Jeb shows up. With Dr. God, who this book is now mostly called Dr. Hans. I’ll keep Dr. God for consistency.

Dr. God, apt followers may recall, is the Nazi-ish German scientist billionaire who was performing cruel human experimentation on African refugees, a plot point we aren’t about to see resolved. Despite that, Max seems angrier at Jeb, and only a bit pissed about Dr. God nearly killing Fang.

Dr. Martinez gets her to let them in to talk. Again, no one really stopping here to remember they should probably run up Geneva. No one is like, killing Dr. God. This is a man who is unequivocally evil. Can someone please shoot him?

Jeb and Dr. God explain how they want Max to be the leader of the next generation of mutant kids, calling them generation 77. Evidently now powers and mutations are cropping up among regular kids, though all evidence points more to scientists just abducting them and causing it.

They want Max to go meet the next generation at a nearby school for gifted kids, the third such school mentioned in this series. It really somehow feels like a secret that mutants exist, with so many people shocked to learn or see them, yet apparently there’s thousands of them all over the place.

Dr. God and Jeb also explain that after the apocalypse Max will be a great leader during the unstable years, and that they think she should start having heirs soon to establish a dynasty. They even have a house in Germany she and Dylan can go to. Max, who is recently 15, is pretty appalled, as is Dr. Martinez. Dylan seems into it.

The worst part? When I cast a surreptitious glance at Dylan and saw the discomfort in his beautiful turquoise eyes morph into a flicker of hope. 

Ch8

Yep. Dylan is a bit hopeful after hearing this, because he likes the idea Max might be forced to— they use this word— breed with him. Real cool guy. Teen heart-throb.

Max doesn’t want to visit the school for gifted kids, but Dr. Martinez is interested, so they all get on yet another jet to fly over. There, Max notices translucent balloons holding up razor wire, which shreds the plane. As it is crashing, the Flock scrambles to save the humans inside and gets thoroughly beat up in the process. Gazzy drops Jeb, but Dylan manages to catch him. Dr. God isn’t seen. There’s a number of broken limbs all around, and Dr. Martinez calls a car to drive them to her vet practice. 

Dylan though wants to stay and look for Dr. God, his creator, and Max joins him. They don’t find him, but bond, primarily over the fact they keep having the same thoughts at the same time. This is meant to show how in sync they are, but wasn’t the whole point of the pairing that Dylan was a complement and Fang was too similar?

They investigate the school the next morning, with Angel showing up, and are shot at by children in all black. They beat them up and take off their hoods, revealing they have no normal eyes but a ring around the top of their head stuffed with hundreds of little eyes. The kids seem brainwashed and talk about a coming end.

They leave, but on the way out find a kid wandering alone in the desert. They fly down to help and recognise him as, inexplicably, the homeless kid from book one who accused Max of hacking his computer with her glitchy brain chip in the tunnels of New York. Remember him? They quiz him on what he’s doing, but he talks about a coming end of humanity and joining with the future. Max and co then just… leave him to die in the desert, I guess. He’s never coming up again.

When they return to Dr. Martinez’s house, everyone is a bit grumpy Max bailed on them like that. Which makes sense— her going with Dylan rather than stay with her injured mom and Flock is very out of character.

Also, Max’s half sister Ella is also talking about a coming Doomsday, and seems brainwashed. Ella has been spending time with Iggy, as they both like each other, and Iggy seems brainwashed as well. In a few days a group called the Doomsday Group has sprung from nothing to thousands of followers, all seemingly brainwashed and led by a girl named Beth who has hypnotic powers even across television. The DG, as they’re called, keep talking about something called “The One Light”, and how the apocalypse is coming soon to destroy humanity. They see humanity as a scourge against the Earth and the end of days as a cleanse for the environment and world, making them a strange sort of pseudo-religious ecoterrorism cult.

Meanwhile, Fang is in California forming his own gang of superpowered mutant kids from applicants on his blog. He gathers Ratchet, who has super hearing and sight; Star, a spoiled rich girl with super speed; Kate, a beautiful girl with super strength; Holden, a boy who can regenerate his entire body, and Maya. Who is Max II from the first trilogy.

Yes, Fang is recovering from his sudden breakup that he instigated by hanging out with Max’s identical twin. He takes a while to even see her as a different person, though as the book even points out, she’s essentially equivalent to Max’s twin sister. She’s a person in her own right, but it’s pretty obvious Fang picked her and is spending time with her to replace Max, which isn’t a cool way to treat Maya or Max. Even when he is slightly thinking about Maya as being different from Max, his thoughts are not flattering —

Maya wasn’t as hard as Max, not quite as tough. She was different, and Fang kind of… liked it. 

Ch 45

Which implies Fang likes Maya because she’s a softer version of Max, which is again, a bit gross.

Fang actually justifies picking her because he wanted a good fighter, but c’mon. Fang’s gang— I’ll call them the Gang to differentiate from the Flock— start noticing the Doomsday Group’s activities too. Most of his Gang are teens who were abducted and experimented on as teens in the last few months, and they want revenge and to stop others from the same fate.

The Gang finds out a huge rally will be taking place at comic con, and Max finds out via Fang’s blog about his Gang and that Maya is in it, which she really isn’t pleased about.

The Flock follows Ella to a meeting of the DG at her high school, where they witness more brainwashed kids obsessed with mutants as the next stage of evolution and who will inherit the Earth. They decide they need to find a way to break the brainwashing, and basically waterboard Iggy in a bathtub until he breaks free.

The Flock starts to wonder if Dr. Martinez is at all in on the DG’s plots, pointing out she was the one who got them to go to that school which was a trap, and she willingly was just chatting to Jeb and Dr. God. Max hates to admit it, but agrees they can’t trust any adults. This feels like Dr. Martinez slander, but okay.

 Ella is out on a camping trip with the DG, but they track her down and break her free of her brainwashing in a hot spring. They learn the DG is talking about the end of the world coming in five days, an alarmingly short timeframe.

Fang asks Max for help, as he has realised this DG stuff might be too big for him and his inexperienced gang. Before the Flock can go help, they find a note from Ella, who has disappeared, saying she was meant to have wings.

The Flock decides the DG threat is more pressing than one person, and again it feels out of character for Max. Yes, I agree I guess, stop the doomsday cult, but Max literally met Ella by flying out of nowhere to save one random kid— the notion she’d swallow her desire to protect her loved ones like this is off. You can’t always save one person and the world, but Max is the exact kind of protagonist who would try. Instead they just leave, and we don’t get closure on Ella in this book.

The Flock and Gang meet. Max and Fang are annoying to each other about their feelings, and Angel starts talking like a grown adult offering relationship counselling. At comic con, Total also says this:

“I’m definitely getting Tricia Helfer’s autograph!” We all turned to look at him. “What?” He said. “She’s hot. For a human.” 

Ch40

I don’t think dogs should be capable of recognizing the sexual attractiveness of humans. Especially not Total. Please.

At the DG rally, they again witness more brainwashing. The DG isn’t a very interesting cult, honestly. For all the rallies and propaganda we see, they only have one core idea and message they repeat, making them surprisingly bland for what they are. It’s an interesting idea wasted as usual. You might as well skim whenever a DG person is speaking, as the entire book they repeat the same idea without offering greater nuance or deeper lore. Doomsday is coming, only some will survive. We don’t even learn what this “One Light” thing refers to.

The Gang and Flock learn the DG have a headquarters in Paris and fly there. They find jobs volunteering in the group as they gather information about a huge rally coming up. Angel and Gazzy meanwhile infiltrate from the inside. They meet a man named Mark, the only adult in the group, who seems to be just some regular middle aged man. It’s left vague, but he might have branded Angel. 

I don’t like that I’m left wondering if the seven year old was branded with a hot iron. It’s a cliffhanger where Mark mentions testing loyalty and pulls an iron out, but we never circle back to it. Pretty wild violence has happened on page in this series, including to the young children, so I’m stumped. 

As everyone but Angel and Gazzy are at the big rally, Angel’s voice appears in Max’s head, telling her to go under the plaza the rally is in. There, Max, Fang, and Dylan find Angel and Gazzy tied up with a huge amount of explosives and chemical gas, enough to level Paris and pollute the air and sea. I thought these guys were anti pollution?

They free the kids, but the bomb has like seven minutes left. Gazzy knows explosives and volunteers to defuse it, with Angel staying to help. Fang also elects to stay, while Max and Dylan return to the surface to warn the crowds.

Everyone is too brainwashed to care when Max tells about the bombs, and security goes to stop them. In the ensuing fight, Fang saves Dylan and Maya saves Max, I guess showing their beefs are squashed. I haven’t spoken much about it as is because the drama is petty and annoying, but this resolution, I promise, isn’t earned.

Star, the super fast girl from Fang’s Gang, apparently emits a high pitched screaming noise when she runs that undoes brainwashing. Convenient! The DG begins to disband and panic. Max fights Mark, the random human bad guy, and drops him from ten feet in the air. This reveals some wires, and then there’s a huge explosion.

Most of the explosives were defused by Gazzy, but apparently there were still more, causing rubble and chaos and untold civilian deaths. Fang and Gazzy emerge from the underground, but Angel doesn’t.

Five hours later Angel still hasn’t returned, and it appears she has died. Max notes the DG probably isn’t over, and we have an unusual amount of open threads as the book closes— Angel’s fate, Ella’s fate, Dr. God, Dr. Martinez, Jeb… though in the epilogue it is revealed Angel is alive but captive to people who assure her she has immense power and must recognise her coming role as superior being.

Honestly in hindsight, Angel isn’t a good book, but it’s not as bad as I expected. I mean, I can’t really pick between it and Fang on which is worse, both being pretty dull overall and too full of manufactured tween drama. It’s ultimately that and the relationship dramas that sour me to it, the poor decisions: Max and Dylan kiss and grow close while in Paris, officially kinda a thing, while Fang and Maya have hints of it. Neither are endgame, I know, but both represent relationships I can only really qualify as problematic. Certainly unenjoyable.

This was the last book in the series I’d ever read. I know I read it when it came out, 2011, which would have made me about 14. Actually prime age for it but so disheartened I couldn’t be bothered to pick up the final book in the series and see how it ended. 

I know spoilers, but it will be a pretty interesting experience to now go and finish the series at last… and see if there’s even a crumb of what made it good in the first place left by the end.

And I hope the Krelp show up again. I hope they’re doing okay. I miss them.

INTERMISSION: MARVEL COMIC

In 2015, long after Maximum Ride was hot, Marvel adapted it. Marvel. The Flock is canon to the extended Marvel universe now. They were there in Endgame if you squinted. I mean, the talking flying dog probably fits in with like, the eighteen other Marvel characters who fit that exact bill.

I missed the comic entirely, as it seemed to be released again without any real buzz. It still somehow lasted fifteen issues, long enough to fully adapt the first trilogy of books.

The Marvel comic is… not very good. I’ve seen the first book adapted a number of times now, and the Marvel take is much shorter than the rest, leaving it little room to feel like it has any identity before it ends. In general, the story and designs are inconsistent, with Ari having three eyes in the start of the series but two later on, and it all feels frantic and crammed together.

Part of this slapped together feeling is likely because each arc was actually worked on by a different creative team. It feels like at that point it was a contract being fulfilled rather than one person’s passion.

The biggest change is the Flock. Instead of wings, the Flock have grafted robot wings, a choice that instantly robs them of their core identity. Yes, it’s wings either way, but the Flock being partially birds is a huge facet of their identities. It’s more than wings, it’s the way they are a Flock rather than a family, and their natural inclination to be free in the sky. I feel like making the wings just implants changes a lot more than the logic of how they’re able to hide so well. Rather than mutants, they’re just people who have robot parts. Anyone can do that at any point. The Flock was engineered through genetic tampering as in utero. That’s a very different origin!

Beyond that, the Marvel comic has that sort of art style that’s gritty, a bit ugly, but mostly uninteresting. There’s very little to talk about in terms of anyone’s designs, except for the fact they all towards the end get special bulletproof combat suits so they look more like generic superheroes. The comic doesn’t even have the bravery to keep Gazzy’s reason for being named the Gasman because he farts, it’s now all about explosives. Cowards.

The one thing to note is that I really like the cover art of the first series. Everything else just isn’t worth checking out in my opinion: the manga literally already exists and is a far superior adaptation, while the Marvel comic wants to be its own thing but doesn’t come up with any new ideas that make it worth checking out.

Book 8: NEVERMORE

I knew how this book ended, but it was actually astonishing to see it in real time. Nevermore, proudly billed the last Maximum Ride adventure, is a book that boggles the mind. It feels like its existence is an unsolved mystery. How did we get here? What the hell just happened?

Why isn’t it a novel?

Firstly, Nevermore is notably written differently. I suspect Max Ride was ghostwritten starting around book 5, but Nevermore has a different style of prose that suggests someone else was responsible for it. It actually, surprisingly, has one of two bits of prose I liked— Max Ride is typically very efficiently written, skipping a lot of description in favour of speed and dialogue, so by prose I mean poetic language.

The thing is, even if I liked a line or two of the more emotional beats, this switch in style stands out. This is book eight, the final book in the series. A bit of consistency would be nice.

Nevermore opens an inconsistent amount of time later, probably months but at one point seeming a year later. Actually, strictly speaking, it begins after the end of the world with Angel gazing upon a broken Earth and fearing a vision of Max dying. This scene of Angel does not actually happen at any point in the book despite being a flash forward. Anyway, back to the present-

We have very little information about what happened since the last book, with the Flock yet again attending a normal school.

Why? Dylan wants to, I guess. Despite Nudge begging to go to school a number of times in the series, Dylan asks and the Flock is off.

The high school is a location utilised and introduced for one purpose really, though, and that’s making use of hot YA tropes of the time. Max is deeply jealous as scantily clad girls fawn over Dylan despite Dylan only having eyes for her. High School is an excuse for Max and Dylan to date, to scorn popular kids, for Dylan to inexplicably rent a motorcycle so they can ride together.

The motorcycle thing gets me. How did he learn? And why did every book of this era have to include a boy on a motorcycle? 

While school is happening though, this idyllic land of YA dreams, the literal end of the world is literally happening. Off to the side. The Flock is very slow to react. Put a damn pin in that.

Meanwhile, Fang is still with his Gang. He isn’t officially with Maya, but it’s an unsaid and obvious thing they are into each other. Fang though, still, can’t help but constantly compare her to Max. Max but less tough, basically, is all he thinks around the girl desperate to for once not be seen as Max II. 

The Gang decides to start looking into a new apocalypse group called The 99 Percent. That name is likely familiar, and would have been way more at the time this book was published. Occupy Wall Street also went by, and was started, off a Tumblr called ‘We Are The 99%’. It’s a reference to the idea that the mega rich of America and the world is only 1% of the population, and how wide the gap between mass poverty and excessive wealth there increasingly has been. Nevermore came out a few years after the Occupy movement was at its zeitgeist, but it’s impossible the authors could have missed it. It is typically called Occupy now, but at the time the notion of the 99% was everywhere, and so the use of it for a doomsday cult seems like a strange choice.

The 99% in Nevermore are basically a combination of the DG from last book and the By-Half plan from book three. Them being a combination of two extremely different styles and notions of the apocalypse doesn’t line up, but okay. The 99% believe that 99% of the population has to die, with every human doomed and only mutants left alive. So it’s a mass suicide cult, then, since it’s led by humans.

Last book the DG felt rather vague on their goals and foundation, but the 99% is given even less character. The book never clarifies if it is brainwashing. Instead, it appears a huge swath of the public has just… gone mad with apocalypse fever, or something. We see only snippets about riots and TV discussions. People are protesting outside maternity wards about how humanity must stop reproducing. A bit late to the game there. People are attacking the disabled for being too weak to survive while everywhere people listen to lectures on the merits of extinction and eugenics.

I find Maximum Ride taking the name and some optics of the Occupy movement and making it a death cult a bit befuddling. There’s a few mentions of celebrity twitter and the news coverage that shows some clear parallels, even though I don’t believe the book is actually trying to call a movement about wealth inequality the same as an ecofacist death cult. But it’s odd they have the same name, right?

All of this is a rather horrifying event the Flock is utterly ambivalent about. It really doesn’t come up between the boy troubles. The Gang, of course, leaves to investigate, but are stopped midway by a convoy.

The convoy is led by Ari. Yes, they dug up my boy. Or cloned him, actually, hundreds of times. The entire convoy is Ari clones. They fight, but are betrayed by Star and Kate, who kinda are sick of being hunted. Maya and Ari fight in the air, and Maya is brutally killed.

Maya’s death was always going to happen, but man, that girl sure had a short stick. She’s been so shafted by the narrative I don’t feel like she’s had enough time to even join my ‘tragic YA girls shafted by the narrative club.’ Maya has not had any space to define herself, ironically, away from Max. It sure doesn’t help that even as she is dying in his arms Fang can only really see Max. She tells Fang she loves him and he says I know.

Fang then breaks up his Gang to wander America for an unclear period of time. Rest in Pieces, Fang’s Gang. You guys were just… nothing.

Back in high school, Max and Dylan are surprised by having to dissect chickens in biology class, which as you can imagine, is very triggering. Max leaves, but Dylan has to return later to grab her books. The teacher talks to Dylan about how Dr. God is actually still alive and Dylan has a new mission: to capture and kill Fang. Apparently Dr. God discovered some huge secret in Fang’s DNA. Because of it, Fang has to die because it might be the end of the world. We’re not privy to the secret yet. Dylan learns and agrees Fang should die, but refuses to work with Dr. God and capture Fang to be experimented on.

Meanwhile, Angel has been captive in a lab for months of nonstop torture. Everyone else believes she died in Paris. The scientists who have her continue to have no clear aim or goal with her, and we never learn if they were doing anything in particular to her. They make her watch a video of the failed operation on Iggy’s eyes that rendered him blind and then assure her they’ve improved in the last decade before operating on her. Angel is blinded. They also clip her wings.

Jeb shows up to talk to Angel, rambling about Ari for no reason in particular. He explains he has been trying to clone him since he died in the third book, with the help of Dr. God. He cries as he talks about how he just wanted another chance with Ari. But also he notes with Dr. God’s help he made Ari ‘bigger and better’ than ever before, and that the failed clones make for a good army.

Jeb here is meant to just be a mad scientist, but I found myself annoyed at this ‘twist’. As much as I hate the guy, he hasn’t really been a character since the main trilogy ended, where it was established he basically was an ass with good intentions. And also an abusive father, of course. Jeb worked with the School to make the Flock and fake saved them and faked dying all as part of some grand experiment, apparently so Max could stop his bosses’ plans for the apocalypse. 

The sudden reveal that he’s now a thorough villain unable to examine the logic of making hundreds of monster clones of his son feels really cheap. Probably because his logic is so strange: he failed his son when Ari was three, but his attempts to fix that are to continuously clone Eraser Ari and even make him stronger. Like dude, make a baby! The logic here is meant to be that there is no logic: he is now just insane, and so I’m stupid for questioning why he would act irrational. But that’s a cheap plot device and no one can stop me.

Jeb also explains that the 99% is ‘all about’ killing Fang. A spoiler, it isn’t, and this makes no sense as a statement. As usual.

The entire Flock suddenly hears the Voice, giving various instructions. Fang is told he needs to be with Max. Max is told to harden her heart. Nudge is told to document everything. Iggy and Gazzy are told to protect Max. Dylan is told he needs to win Max’s heart. The Voice also says the world is about to change.

The Flock though barely reacts to this. It’s still teen YA romance shenanigans. Despite kissing in the last book and being into each other, Max and Dylan’s relationship hasn’t progressed in the last months, still being undefined. Dylan makes Max a treehouse in secret since he knows how much she loves treehouses, something which has never been mentioned in eight books. Max and him kiss, but then she accidentally knocks over a candle and burns it down.

Fang makes his way back to the Flock, setting tension between Dylan and Max. Fang then gets an email from his blog, where someone says their dad works at a secret lab and attaches a photo of Angel’s body. Convenient! Everyone flies down to Colorado to look for her. They find a lab which suddenly explodes, and searching around they find an immense amount of dead bodies, including a lot of scientists who have obviously committed mass, ritualistic suicide.

Mark, the random middle aged man who showed up last book as a villain, who still has had no backstory or explanation, is there. He’s manic and deeply wounded and says that a contagion has been unleashed and the apocalypse is here. Then he commits suicide.

…The plot of this book is really pretty dark, huh. All the petty teen drama keeps being contested with such grim visions of utter madness and death. In some ways I wonder if maybe this was a goodbye to Maximum Ride formed out of some sort of bitterness.

They find Angel in a secret basement, barely alive, and save her. She recovers in their house as Max and Fang reconnect, establishing their status as endgame couple. Dylan sees them being close in the woods and flies into a rampage. It’s a long quote, but look.

Bam!

He brought his feet down, hard, on the roof of a car that was driving toward town, making a huge dent.

Bam! Bam! Bam! Three more cars suffered the same fate. Dylan felt a rush of thrill and fear: This was the best he’d felt since Fang had come back.

On the next car, Dylan dropped down even lower. Snap! One quick kick took the side mirror right off. Crash! A rear windshield was smashed to smithereens.

It was an incredible feeling of power, a power he’d never felt before.

He rose a bit and banked sideways dramatically, hearing car horns honking, people shouting. He wheeled around the store on the corner, then swooped down and grabbed the store’s banner with one hand, ripping it from where it had hung across the sidewalk. It landed on a car driving underneath it, causing the driver to lose control and crash into a telephone pole.

But Dyland was already halfway down the street, ripping street signs from their posts and hurling them like Frisbees. […]

Over and over, he dropped down suddenly, kicked over a mailbox, a trash can, a trellis. But the pain in his chest was returning. He reached up and ripped the electrical wires strung along the street from their poles. Sparks shot everywhere as the live wires fell to the ground, igniting the bulging trash bags that lined the curb.

Ch 58

Man, Dylan is the worst. I’ll go ahead and just assume he killed at least one person throwing a hissy fit over Max having free will. Later when Max learns of this on the news, she actually feels bad, saying the damage he caused was probably proportional to the amount of hurt in his heart… essentially blaming herself for his shitty reaction. Dylan, as said, keeps filling the role of an emotionally abusive man who puts Max’s attention on him as hostage to his life and his ability to not do bad things. What a schmuck.

And yes, this romance drama stuff is happening post the news a deadly pathogen has been released onto the world. The Flock just doesn’t seem to comprehend the idea maybe someone should do something. Like. Maybe them? Maybe? Could someone also please, please arrest or kill that nazi Dr. God also?

Dylan decides that since Max isn’t dating him, he probably will kill Fang after all, thinking it is for the greater good and maybe Max will later forgive him.

Jeb shows up at the Flock’s house with his pack of sons. He explains Fang has to die, and why: Fang’s DNA is indestructible and holds the secret of immortality. Fang isn’t immortal, but in theory could be used to learn how to create immortality. Jeb explains the fact that if everyone was immortal, overpopulation would be a big issue, and so the 99% plan has to happen so that isn’t a thing. 

As people may realise, this doesn’t logically parse. I don’t know enough about DNA to say if it being indestructible could transfer to inventing immortality, but it certainly seems a bit much to kill all of humanity just in case. Obviously the School or Itex or Dr. God or whatever has been trying to kill humanity so mutants can rule for a long time, despite the fact all of them are humans. But Jeb implies that Fang’s special DNA is the reason the 99% is acting now, and essentially the panic in the scientific community of immortality maybe being invented soon is why the scientists have released a super plague to wipe out humanity. If you have a deadly plague and want to kill humanity, why wait for Fang at all? Why make the 99% movement cult thing? The apparent end goal of science in this world is the ecofascist notion that humanity is a plague on the Earth where the only solution is eugenics.

I probably should briefly explain ecofacism, which is a weird sentence for a Max Ride video. It’s not quite the best term, but I don’t know a better one. The villains in this series have a very confusing philosophy, but overall they believe humanity needs to be strong and evolved, specifically because of man-made climate change. They express this mostly through ableism and eugenics. In later books like Nevermore, the focus is especially the concept of humans as a scourge or parasite that must die in order to save the earth. Or at least, a portion of them.

It’s definitely unusual when you first hear of it to associate facism and the green movement, but everything can overlap if you are a very determined extremist. Ecofacism generally is very concerned with overpopulation and uses ‘saving the planet’ as an excuse for fascist ideas such as ceasing immigration, extreme loyalty to one’s nation, and the death of so-called undesirables in society like migrants, minorities, and the disabled. Maximum Ride obviously avoids the heavier fascist ideas, but you can understand why I feel it’s an appropriate term here.

While I’m here also, briefly: I feel like I should say humanity is not a parasite or plague. Humanity is humanity. Like, we’re here and we’re not going away suddenly. The environment needs protection and care, and humans have and still live perfectly in harmony with it in every way. The problems we have, and the issues of climate change and pollution, are pretty concisely not a collective sin so much as the end result of an era of consumption and capitalism. Like. It’s all capitalism, guys: we as individuals can live greener, but the main polluters and the main ones holding society back are not the people, it’s the companies who have vested interest in archaic technologies like coal or loosening environmental protection through lobbying or pushing products that make plastic waste because it’s cheaper than being careful.

This is all information we’ve kinda known for a very long time. Maximum Ride at times seems to know it too, that it’s bigger systems that are the issue, yet even in the final book the Flock seems helpless and ambivalent. The world is ending and we aren’t pretending it was anything but inevitable.

Anyway. Apparently Dr. God found out Fang might create immortality and told everyone in the scientific community, so now everyone knows this secret and wants to capture or kill Fang for themselves. Jeb and his son army don’t want to kill Fang, they feel like they have to.

The Flock fights the Ari army. Dylan arrives to help, but after beating back the Aris, he starts choking Fang out too. Max has to beg for his life, and then Dylan flies away.

Dr. Martinez shows up at their house. Angel warns that she saw Dr. Martinez with Jeb when she was captured, but Dr. Martinez claims Jeb had brainwashed her somehow. Angel checks her mind and determines this is true.

Angel sometimes gets POVs, but only in the first book did she seem to ever use her mind powers. If she could just read people’s thoughts and affirm their allegiance… well, Angel, that would have been quite nice a long time ago.

Dr. Martinez explains that the 99% plan has begun and that she’s come to take the Flock somewhere safe. Despite all of the books being about how Max has to save the world, they do. They just leave.

Also, Ella is there. Last book Ella disappeared to try to get wings from the DG, but that has been retconned and changed, and she’s fine now. Cool. The Flock is flown to a tropical island paradise to await the end of days. The dogs are also there, by the way, Total just really hasn’t been included much lately. It’s like the series is embarrassed to have a talking, flying dog.

This island is owned by someone I really have not spoken about at all, and that’s because he’s never actually shown up in person. The guy is Nino Pierpont, the richest man in the world. He’s been the Flock’s sponsor since book four.

Which raises a lot of questions. He’s the one who funded their new houses and the CSM and all those private jets. He’s basically just a cheat code of a man, there to explain funding with a wave of the hand. But there is something kinda off about the multi-billionaire richest man ever funding all this from the sidelines. It’s a common and pretty truthful phrase that one can’t be a billionaire without exploiting someone. That amount of gross wealth is so intangibly high humans can really barely understand it. It’s nice Nino Pierpont is funding efforts to raise awareness of climate change and help the Flock, but actually, shouldn’t he maybe be doing more?

Well, apparently he has been doing one thing more: making a tropical island apocalypse shelter. The place the Flock arrives in is full of mutant kids like themselves in a huge paradise park, where each Flock member has their own custom treehouse and below the surface is a state of the art bunker meant to survive anything. The only humans are Dr. Martinez, Ella, and Nino Pierpont, making this his first actual in person appearance.

The Flock enjoys their new home, which seems utterly perfect, not blinking much at the coming doomsday they keep being reminded of. Dr. Martinez explains the virus that was released is an edited version of the Avian flu that the Flock is immune to due to their mixed DNA, and that it will only kill humans. Of course, it surely would kill all other mutants too if its the avian mix that specifically protects them, but there’s another wrench: Dr. Martinez also explains how the virus, called ‘The Finisher’, mutates and mimics other viruses and is impossible to create a vaccine against even with the foreknowledge she and Pierpont have had. If this virus is that mutable it can’t be prevented at all, if it evolves and mutates that rapidly… um, it’s probably going to be able to easily evolve to the point it affects animal life or mutants. Just a fact.

Max actually points out that if Nino Pierpont and others have known about this for long before she was born and had the time to make all these bunkers and prepare, they surely should have had time to do something. That might be the only and best commentary Max Ride has ever offered, and it leaves Pierpont speechless beyond the claim a vaccine is impossible. Because yeah, a lot of people have known for a long time what is going to happen to the earth, and only the super rich have been able to independently really prepare for it. Millionaire doomsday preppers are very much a thing.

A lot of people would rather prepare and survive the apocalypse than actually stop it.

Max and Fang enjoy paradise some more. Dylan shows up suddenly, saying he’d seen something huge in the sky and that everyone has to flee into the bunkers. Max quizzes him on this, and despite knowing and having heard Dylan is capable of seeing the future, doesn’t believe him. Dylan falsely says he has never lied to Max, and I think it’s probably the author forgetting he has already lied in this book alone rather than meant to be a reflection on him sucking.

Angel shows up and also tells Max she has seen visions of the apocalypse and Max should trust Dylan, but despite knowing Angel has also had visions of the future, doesn’t really believe her. Dylan leaves to go ring the alarms and get everyone into the bunker.

Max continues to argue, eventually deciding randomly she should go fly to the mainland and go die. Literally.

“I’m tired of running from the unknown. If this threat is real, I’m going to face it, whatever it is, with the rest of the world.”

[…Fang decides to join Max on this…]

“We’ll fly back to face the 99%,” he said, nodding at me.[…]

“But it’s not them!” Angel shrieked from the ledge.” Aren’t you listening? All the preparation Dr. Martinez and Pierpont and Jeb and all the other whitecoats did, poking and prodding and testing us, shooting us up with God knows what to make us immune- it was all totally pointless! It’s not coming from the 99%. It’s coming from the sky.”

Fang shrugged. “Then we’ll face the thing in the sky. Whatever it is, we’ll face it together.” He gave my hand a squeeze, and tears streamed down my face.

“You’ll die here!” Angel cried. “You’ll both die, falling, just like I saw.”

I looked down at her, not sure how to explain myself. “Angel, I was supposed to save the world,” I said quietly. I paused for a moment, realizing the gravity of that statement, and then stood up straighter, suddenly more sure of myself than I’d ever been. “I was supposed to save the whole world- not just the ‘special’ ones, not just the ones who have the protection of some multibillionaire. So if the rest of the world has to die, I have to go down with them.”

Ch 82

Yeah, beloved tween book hero Max Ride decides to go off and kill herself. This is why I again wonder if spite was involved in this book, somewhere- the decision to have our hero just utterly give up, fly back to die in the end of days, is comically dark and out of place. After a book of teen drama and not caring about the apocalypse, Max suddenly cares so much she wants to go die for humanity’s sins or something. She doesn’t even think of the rest of the Flock, who by the way do not appear for the rest of the book. The Flock has felt less and less like a family despite that being part of the core idea, and in the end the fierce leader and guardian of them is going to go die with her boyfriend.

Angel stops them from flying by suddenly exclaiming she is the Voice. And she has been the entire time. 

This is treated by the book as true, not a lie by Angel, but it is worth stating that it makes no sense. Angel is not the Voice, even though she explains with multiple examples from the series she has been the Voice the entire time. Multiple times the Voice has spoken to Max about things Angel does not know, or failed to inform her of things Angel did know. The Voice sounds nothing like Angel, speaking much more like… well, Jeb, who it originally was. The Voice also has given Max advice contrary to what Angel has wanted.

If Angel was the Voice, don’t you think maybe, you know… before they rescued her, Angel might have used it to tell Max she was alive?

As Max is reeling from this information, the sky suddenly explodes. Yep, they wasted enough time that the apocalypse happened. It’s a bit vague what has happened, with the sky appearing torn in two. The description almost sounds supernatural, two flaming halves with a growing empty gash splitting in the middle. They fly towards the shelters but are stopped by a sudden loud bang and a wave of extreme heat. Then they are hit by a mega tsunami.

The book then fakes out that Max has died, with a full epilogue where she speaks to the reader as if she is dead but has somehow delivered this book to us. She tells the reader to act now and save the world, and doesn’t even admit she totally failed. I know the girl couldn’t stop a random meteor, but c’mon. This is a series vaguely about Max having to save the world, and at the very end she utterly fails. Almost all of humanity is wiped out and she has taken no direct action this book beyond kissing boys.

In a second epilogue, Dylan saves Max and Fang, and them plus Angel observe the ruins of the island. They sort of come around to thinking the new, post apocalyptic world was made for them after all, and almost appear hopeful about the new world. 

Ideas that utterly defy the entire purpose of the full series and what Max told us. Apparently, everyone in the world dying horrifically to a mix of a massive meteor and a deadly pathogen that rots skin off your bones is a good thing after all. Max sure seems happy. There’s no mention of the rest of the Flock, though Angel can tap into Dr. Martinez’s head to say the rest of the world has been similarly devastated by natural disasters, so we can presume they are dead.

Max gazes into the sky and says this as the final words.

It is my time.

The time of Maximum Ride.

See what I mean about the bitterness of this ending? The strangeness? It feels like Nevermore is some act of protest against the series itself and the direction it was heading in. Teen drama over hijinks, over fun, over saving the world: so the world just burned without them, the end. Everyone is dead. Screw you for thinking the world could be saved, you idiot. We’re probably better off now doing exactly what those ecofacist scientists always wanted. In the end, even Max seems to agree, and accepts her fate entirely rather than fight it. She’s going to lead the next generation of evolved humans after all. I guess the villains won, when you think of it that way.

Man, I hope the Krelp are okay.

CONCLUSION

Maximum Ride is. Something, huh? Thanks for coming along on the… y’know, ride. It sure took off flying and dove right downhill, but in a pretty fascinating way. Watching it unfold, I’d never noticed how inconsistent the difference between the trilogy and book 4 was, or how separate book 5 to 8 was. The Antarctic plotline really was a fever dream, huh.

Maximum Ride compels me because it was good and it so easily could have been good. If at book four J Pat had just sketched out a new villain with a new scheme that could be covered in three books full of silly detours and crazy twists, it would have been beloved whether or not it’d been cohesive. Especially in hindsight, the sloppiness of the first trilogy plot wise feels like a comfortable rhythm of nonsense compared to the slog of later books. Sure, we’ll never know why that Ouija Board was sending Max a message in a toy store once or why she kept thinking she was turning into an Eraser, but those dropped threads are far more tolerable than Dylan and retcons and the literal end of the world.

When I went to start reading for this, I couldn’t find any Max Ride books in my local library system beyond the manga, and for someone who constantly circles the ten used book shops in my city, I’ve never seen a physical copy there either. It’s odd, because it was a veritable best seller by an author who only makes bestsellers. Max Ride was a huge, huge hit that died a slow, slow death it didn’t deserve. One so preventable. I keep thinking about how I’d do a book series about mutant lab kids and how fun it’d be. What went wrong?

Still, at the end of it all, I’m glad to be done with it. Eight books is a lot, and I’m sorry I’ve been slow about getting through them. I mean a month really isn’t that bad. I shouldn’t be hard on myself. Anyways, now I’m taking a break now, and-

Oh. Wait. 

Wait.

I forgot something.

There’s um. So. Sooooooo…..

There’s actually three more Maximum Ride books?

Nevermore, which says on it clearly it is the final Max Ride book (not novel), which ends with the protagonist passively watching the world end, is not the final book.

Three years later in 2015, maybe because of the very poor reception, Maximum Ride Forever was released. Then in 2020 and 2021, a sequel series called Hawk was released. Hawk is about Max’s eventual teen daughter, and I’m not going to read it now, but might if there’s enough interest.

But yes. Maximum Ride Forever. A book fully post apocalyptic. Aw, gee.

Book 9: MAXIMUM RIDE FOREVER

Do you know about a fanfiction called Fallout Equestria? It’s extremely famous in the My Little Pony fandom and beyond, and imagines the world of the hit video game series Fallout populated by the cute cartoon horses of My Little Pony. I’m not here to draw broad comparisons, I have no interest in reading it, but it comes to mind as I discuss Maximum Ride Forever. The secret extra actual final book, released three years later.

Do you remember, a long time ago, the first trilogy in this series? How it was about a bunch of wacky mutant bird kids who faced evil horrors but with sass and hijinks? How there was literally a character named The Gasman because he farted a lot, and how the end of the world seemed to be stopped by some kids protesting and a few fun fights?

Well, Maximum Ride Forever, the resting place for The Flock, is so far removed from that it is hard to feel like it isn’t a fanfic crossover. My beloved childhood characters soar through ash and mud and nuclear fallout, desperately searching for bugs to eat and freshwater. Everyone has died and many more will die, and this book is notably even more brutal about all of it, from feral dogs tearing a flap of skin off Nudge’s face to Fang being torn apart by seagulls to Max gouging out a man’s eyes before he commits suicide. The gore and misery are off the charts this book, yet it never feels like it wants to be adult, either. The cast is still in arrested development up to the very end, still nebulously a year older than they began the series, still captivated by drama until the sluggish end.

This is a strange one. I think I’m right: by the end, someone really really hated Maximum Ride. And they were the one writing the final book.

Nevermore failed to resolve almost anything, but had a slightly hopeful note to its end. After the meteor, the Flock we saw was okay and their home seemed broken but still paradise. Three months later, we start this book and learn it is Hell.

Though the rest of the Flock is there now, there’s been no word from the shelter below the island, and Dr. Martinez and Ella are presumed dead. A volcano has made the area uninhabitable, but the Flock still lingers, Max holding out for survivors.

During an eruption, Dylan doubles back for their clean water supply but never returns. They find his charred shoe, and accept him as dead.

The Flock finally leaves the island. While sheltering in the flooded ruins of Sydney, they witness mass graves and piles of rotting corpses from a mix of the tsunami, meteor, and deadly virus. They are then attacked by gigantic, hairless dog-like creatures dubbed Cryenas, which nearly skin Nudge and fatally wound Akila, Total’s normal dog wife. Akila dies and as the flock rests at a cabin to bury her, they argue about where to head. Angel insists they go to Russia for unknown reasons. Max wants to go back to the island to look for her family and survivors again. Fang has been shown by Angel a vision of his death and thinks he should head off alone. Iggy and Gazzy want to chase up a message about a shelter in America they found from a few minutes of internet. The Flock then…does just split up. Entirely.

It’s not the first time, but it feels far more final in a post apocalyptic hellhole full of death. Everyone basically agrees to go split up and die alone, it feels like. You can understand the high emotions and tensions in the situation, but it still feels wrong. And stupid.

Actually, before they split up, Fang lies to Max. He says he’ll stay with her, Nudge, and Total. Max and Fang are cemented in love, you gotta remember, at last— they actually have sex, but he leaves on his own in the morning. Why he feels he has to die alone is unresolved and annoying, as it’s been previous times this exact plot point came up. His death vision isn’t even linked to Max, nor does he know how soon it is. He just leaves. 

Meanwhile, as the Flock splits, we check in on a guy named The Remedy. He lives in a huge underground city bunker and talks to someone he calls one of his Horsemen. The Horseman is actually named a string of letters and numbers, seemingly a clone with a single mission: kill the Flock. The Remedy says the Flock are old, failed specimens that must be killed so the next generations will be stronger, and how he is a simple doctor who wants to cure the planet of its ills before he too will kill himself.

Horseman, as he calls himself, is extremely strong and determined on his mission. He’s one of many Horsemen, enhanced mutant soldiers, but is called Horseman, something that might be a bit confusing.

Max, Nudge, and Total return to the island. For the first time, somehow, they bump into some survivors. They are fishkids, the only survivors of the underground bunkers, which flooded during the apocalypse. Dr. Martinez and Ella are confirmed dead. Fun! The fishkids are extremely blase about death: as Max and co swim through an underwater tunnel to reach their bunker home, giant lampreys start swarming on them. Max fights them off, but witnesses another fishkid not escape so easily.

His mouth opened in a silent scream, a flurry of bloody bubbles escaping from it, and the muscles in his neck tightened into cords of agony. His eyes bulged in disbelief as his legs flailed and his hands scratched and tugged at the creature desperately.

The sucking mouth was burrowing into him.

Aiming my [oxygen] tank, I opened the valve, but only a tiny stream of bubbles came out: I’d used up the last of the oxygen. My mouth pressed tight in shock, I saw Johnny’s head go limp, his whole body becoming boneless, like a rag doll’s. Instinctually I moved away from him. When I looked back a final time, more toothy mouths had latched on to Johnny’s body, burrowing into his chest, thighs, and stomach until he looked like some sort of mutant octopus. Two brilliant red ribbons of blood floated up out of his nostrils. 

Ch 30

Like. Yeah. Huh. We learn six other fishkids died in the same way, and that everyone is numb to it happening. (Also, yes, she can breath underwater still, she just has one).

This is so brutal and horrifying and isn’t this the book series with the silly talking winged dog? Who is now going through bereavement?

They stay with the fishkids for a day, but after Max learns her family is dead, she wants to move on. Oh, also, the richest man in the world Nino Pierpont died of dehydration after locking himself in the food vault. Max decides to go, not having much direction in mind but maybe Fang, but Nudge and Total decide to stay with the safety of the fishkids.

Max flies off and witnesses the apocalypse in Africa. She meets two human survivors, but they attempt to cut off and eat her wings. She meets a bad guy who works for The Remedy, who warns she can’t avoid his Horsemen before he kills himself.

We go to Nudge’s POV as she is strangled to death in a pool by Horseman, and learn Total was impaled shortly after. Fun!

Fang is flying around California when a flock of feral seagulls descend, another horrible scene I want to read part of.

They went for the exposed parts of him first— his face, his neck, his hands— but soon dove at anything not covered by fabric. Sharp breaks tore out clumps of hair and gouged his cheeks.

Fang held one hand across his eyes and tried to gain altitude, but the gulls didn’t let up. On every inch of skin, exposed nerves sang in protest as the wind found fresh wounds.

I’m one of you! Fang wanted to scream, but they were pecking at his lips, and he couldn’t open his mouth.

The squawking in his ears and full body attack made coherent thought impossible, and Fang kept trying to fly upward, unsure what the gulls’ top altitude could be. This meant his wings were fully exposed, and with raucous cries the birds tore into his glossy black feathers. Fang felt the rawness in the spaces between them as whole rows were pecked away.

Ch 41

Gotta love beloved characters being brutally eviscerated by feral animals. A classic. 

Fang escapes, but then meets two child soldiers who mistake him for a Horseman. They brag about how many survivors they’ve killed, and how The Remedy has instructed the One Light cult to kill everyone they meet. Fang fights the kids and is helped by Star, the super speed girl who betrayed him. Star explains she was offered the opportunity to become a Horseman but escaped, and that Jeb was the one manufacturing a special serum that makes Horsemen so powerful.

Max meanwhile is looking for Fang with just luck on her side. She meets a group of feral bird kids, who are far more bird than human. One of them, who she dubs Harry, is extremely attached and follows her from his Flock. He seems to have some intelligence and memory but mostly acts like a young child, recognizing Max from a newspaper clipping he has saved from book four. He however looks like a super hot teen. She and Harry are captured by One Light cultists, led by a man pretending to be The Remedy. The imposter Remedy says he’s been able to live by tricking these feral children and giving them survivors as sacrifices, and sends a wave of young children to go murder Max and Harry. They manage to escape from the bloodthirsty crowd. Harry kisses Max suddenly, which is extremely weird and all it achieves is making everyone uncomfortable.

Gazzy and Iggy search for a bunker they heard of but can’t find, stumbling upon some hostile other survivors who put them to work in their camp. Horseman arrives and they attempt to escape, with Gazzy accidentally exploding himself in the process. Iggy flees for a long time but is eventually caught and killed. Estate readers may notice the Flock is being murdered in the exact order of importance — Nudge, Total, Gazzy, and now Iggy. And yes, I believe the books do place Nudge as less important than the dog.

We go to Angel, who can see and fly despite ending the last book blind and with clipped wings. Angel has been flying across the world finding survivors and gathering them in Russia, at the bunker of The Remedy. How so many people are supposed to make it to Russia— many of them from America— is a mystery.

Fang is flying towards Russia himself when he spots a figure fighting Erasers and goes to help. It is, somehow, Dylan. The Erasers are not Ari clones, it seems, but are now Horsemen too— making them extremely powerful. Fang has seen from Angel he will die to Erasers in snow but doesn’t flee from this.

Jeb is there, who informs Fang that the Horsemen serum is made from Fang’s immortal DNA, and Fang is torn apart by Erasers.

Dylan then meets up with Angel, informing her Fang is dead and it is done, before kneeling at her feet.

Max then stumbles upon Dylan and Angel. She has heard from checking the internet briefly about all of the Flock being dead. Dylan, however, explains that it isn’t true: The Flock is still alive!

Obviously. Or… not that obviously? The book sure makes it sound like they were all horrendously murdered, and part of me wondered if the book might just do that, kill everyone off so the series could end in a blaze of despair. But no.

In truth, Horseman is Dylan. He was captured by The Remedy, who is actually Dr. God. I’ve been begging for the cast to kill that guy, and look what my advice could have prevented: the literal end of days. Dr. God made Dylan a Horseman but the programming into an assassin never took and he was fully in control. He faked the Flock’s deaths under guidance of Angel. 

Except Fang, who really died. The Erasers were sent without Dylan’s knowledge and tore him apart before he rolled off a cliff.

The Flock regathers in Russia outside Dr. God’s bunker, along with the army Angel has been collecting. The army is mostly new characters, because everyone we know and love is dead, but Fang’s Gang is also there.

Angel gives a leader speech and uses her psychic powers to show everyone a vision of the world ending. After, she tells Max that when she went blind she later realised she had psychic visions. The wise reader will recall Angel had these visions before her eyes were experimented on in Nevermore, but okay.

They go to battle. Every YA series from this era ended with a giant battle that didn’t necessarily make sense and wasn’t fun to read, but Maximum Ride is a series that predated this trend, so it’s off that it follows suit. A bunch of previous Max Ride baddies put up a fight as well as a brainwashed child army. Star shows up and runs so fast she breaks their brainwashing, again.

Max and Dylan infiltrate the bunker to find Dr. God. They meet Jeb, who is fully insane now and talks about how mutants are too human and how the next generation will be immortal robot mutants without any humanity. Star and Kate show up and snap his neck, finally killing him.

Max finds Dr. God, who has turned his body into a bomb. Dr. God explains his evil plan. After the plague was released, which the Flock utterly ignored in the last book, he made himself a hero by giving out vaccines. All information the Flock again somehow missed. This led to him being put in charge of Russia’s nuclear arsenal to shoot down a coming meteor, but he didn’t, letting it hit the Earth. Then he set off hundreds of nuclear bombs across the world and further made his army to kill the survivors.

Really implausible, ridiculous plan that relies on things not seen in the last book, cool. Also, shooting a meteor with a nuke? Really? That would, you know, cause nuclear fallout worldwide if it had happened. Because it’s a nuke.

Dr. God talks about how her generation and she were nothing special and must die out, to which Max reveals she is pregnant with Fang’s child. Dr. God attempts to stab her stomach with a pen, and she drops him. He attempts to set off the bomb he’s rigged to his life but it fails, having been deactivated off page. He dies at last.

After the battle, Angel reveals nuclear winter is coming and they will need to all bunker up for several years. Dylan goes to show Max something: Fang’s dead body. He’s secretly healed Fang up and offers to use science to bring Fang back to life. Max agrees, and Dylan kills himself with an electric jolt which then flows into Fang and returns him from death. Oh boy. He leaves a note about loving Max and being happy to make her happy with his death. Oh boy.

Everyone shelters for four years underground. Fang is fine and they have a baby girl. After nuclear winter, the Flock flies to Machu Picchu and chills out, with the end of the book being Max teaching her five year old, Phoenix, how to fly.

The actual end. Ish

…

We can only pray that the Krelp are okay.

True conclusion

By the end of Maximum Ride, I didn’t feel like I was reading Maximum Ride. I’m going to have to find and replace the word weird from this document, but I find it hard to fully summarise the series without that word. It is hardly the only series initially for tweens that grew increasingly dark, but while the others felt like stories that had to grow, with worlds and characters to match, Maximum Ride was always a limited story unable to grasp the global scale it wanted. The thing that makes it fail, I think, is that I don’t think it ever truly tried.

I don’t know that I’d call the first trilogy in the series a work of passion and masterful storytelling, but James Patterson had an idea and stuck with it. Sure, it was based on tiny chapters, cheap jokes, and nonstop plot twists, but there was fun there. Someone liked writing Maximum Ride at first.

Somewhere around book four, after it was supposed to be over, success took over. It had sold incredibly well and people wanted more. Patterson is not an author who stops a series that is selling, and so Maximum Ride kept going. Rolling over without an identity. It grew to be darker and more mature but there was no love or commitment to any of it. It all felt like an obligation.

I don’t know what to make of the way it ends. Two apocalypses and the sense of gloom that sticks to them. I don’t think for a second Patterson still being at the helm would have made it better, but at that point Maximum Ride truly felt like a spreadsheet of numbers. Still selling, and so again we go: more of the same, to no particular end.

Finishing it gives me at least some satisfaction that I’ve witnessed it. I can tell people about it like some apocalyptic storyteller weaving a narrative long past and warning people not to go where the ancients once did. I don’t feel satisfied though. Max Ride Forever is more of a conclusion, but the story it is ending is not the Maximum Ride I actually care about. It just feels like an obligation I’m freed from.

At least until the post goes out and I talk to people nonstop in the comments about it for weeks.

Thanks though for coming on this. Um. This. You know.

This Maximum…. Ride……….

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