Maximum Ride: School’s Out Forever

Author: James Patterson
Publishing Info: Published in 2007 by Vision
Suggested reading level: Ages 9 - 12

Synopsis:
School’s Out Forever is Maximum Ride’s second adventure as the leader of a group of young “mutant bird freaks,” as they call themselves. She and her Flock--Fang, Iggy, Nudge, Angel, and Gasman--have escaped their prison, picked up a talking dog they call Trouble, and found their way to Washington D.C. where they hope to find their parents. Just before reaching the capitol city, though, they run into Erasers (human-wolf hybrids designed to find and capture escapees) who have been retrofitted with wings to help them take out Max’s flock. Fang is mortally wounded and they have to take him to a hospital, where it quickly becomes apparent that he is not a normal human. The FBI get involved, and the lead agent Anne Walker, offers to let them stay at her strangely perfect house in Virginia. Once they’ve been there a few weeks, Anne enrolls them in all in school, and for some reason, they go along with it. They all enjoy (and sometimes hate) seeing what it feels like to be normal kids and do things normal kids their age do. The Erasers, including a back-from-the-dead (with no explanation as to how) Ari, who wants nothing more than to see Max dead, find them and do a dismal job of trying to capture them. Anne betrays the kids eventually and they leave for Florida on a whim of Angels. After a few mishaps and a detour to Disney World, Max gets captured and replaced by a genetic copy of herself. While the real Max is in a sense deprivation tank for two days, the flock and the new Max break into a building owned by a company called Itex, because they think Itex is the brains behind the plot to destroy the world for which Max was created to stop. The real Max escapes just in time to help the flock escape the trap that the new Max lead the group into, even though they knew she wasn’t the real Max. At the end of the book, they are flying

Analysis:
Maximum Ride: School’s Out Forever was a page-turner with edge-of-your-seat action around every corner. The characters are fun and witty and you get to see their personalities come out, so you feel like you know them. I thought it was a well-written book, with a lot of good dialog. That being said, I think it has an underdeveloped plot with a fair share of holes in it. Also, the action (including more than a little violence), the dialog, and the setting are very masculine-oriented, but the main character is a 14-year-old girl, who is trying to be a mom to five other kids, so it is hard to decide where this book fits in. I would probably recommend it for boys but either could enjoy it if they like action. This book is the second in a series of five books and has little in the way of a conclusion, so it would be hard to teach this book by itself. However, this series could be used to introduce the ideas of morality (as individuals, businesses, and as a nation), judging others, and trust.