Found Not Lost

In the second book, we meet up with the talking dog. In this third book, we see more of Fang the blogger. While I have been enjoying the series, I am really amused by the fact that bloggers are going to save the world in the third book. 

Some mysteries are revealed in this third book, like who Max’s real parents are.

The saving the world ending is a little lame, but for teen fiction, I think it’s good enough. It keeps you entertained and wanting more.

If you are interested, the author, James Patterson has a blog too: James Patterson’s Amazon Blog

If you’d like to see Fang’s blog, visit: http://maximumride.blogspot.com

What I wrote about Book 1 and Book 2:
Angel Experiment
School’s Out Forever

The saga of Maximum Ride and her flock of flying kids continues. After they rescue their youngest member, Angel, from the ’school’ as the dessert laboratory, where they were all created by grafting avian DNA to their human ones, is called, they make it their quest to find who their real parents are. They travel cross country to New York where they attempt to infiltrate the ‘institute’ while being pursued by their nemesis, the Erasers, who are humans genetically spliced with the wolf DNA.

If you appreciate sarcasm, you will find Max’s teenage wit hilarious. I laughed out loud on more than one occasion and smiled in approval the rest of the time. In this volume, they also add another member to their flock, Total, the talking dog. Fang gets badly hurt from a fight with Ari, the Eraser who just happened to be Max’s brother, and they have no choice but take him to a hospital for help. During their stay at the hospital, they meet Anne, supposedly with the FBI, who becomes their benefactor and surrogate mom. They go to live with her in Virginia and even get a chance to go to a ‘normal’ school with other kids. Of course, things don’t always go perfectly. Read the books and you will soon be hooked too as one revelation leads to another and never quite the way you expected it to.

My Review of Maximum Ride Book #1

This is another trilogy. This one is the Maximum Ride trilogy by James Patterson. Yep, he also writes teen fiction.

Maximum Ride is a fourteen year old girl who can fly. Max and five other children live by themselves in a remote are in Colorado. They are the result of a gene splicing experiment which spliced 2% of avian DNA into their human DNA giving them the ability to fly. Their protector, Jeb, stole them from the laboratory facility in Death Valley where they were created and ran away with them to this remote area in Colorado. It has been two years since they have seen him though, he mysteriously disappeared. Max, the oldest of the group has been taking care of younglings since.

One morning when the flock was picking strawberries, Erasers swooped down and kidnapped Angel, their youngest member and took her back to the ’school’ as they call the Death Valley laboratory. The erasers are another laboratory experiment. They are human who spliced with lupine gene making them part wolf and they are the laboratory’s ‘henchmen’ sent to hunt down the flock. In this first book, Max and the rest of the flock determine to rescue Angel from what is sure to be an unpleasant experimentation at the lab. What they estimated to be a six hour trip from Colorado to California turned out to be much longer as they get detoured along the way.

This is a very exciting read, stimulating the imagination through James Patterson’t vivid description. I love books with so much visual descriptions that it is almost like watching a movie.

Stay tuned for the next adventure. I am now reading the next book, School’s Out - Forever.

Specials is the third book in the Uglies trilogy by Scott Westerfield. For someone who had turned away from prettiness to join the rebel smokies, Tally Youngblood has transformed not only pretty but now she is special too.

In a future world where everyone is born ugly until they are transformed to become pretties, the specials are the pretty police. They are super pretties, modified to be superior in strength and intellect. They are the CIA, the NSA, and every top secret spy organization you can imagine. They are the Special Circumstances unit, they take care of special circumstances that are beyond the capability of pretty wardens to take care of.

The adventure, in the complex story telling of Scott Westerfield, continues to intrigue in this final installment. Read how Tally Youngblood finally completes the circle of her journey, changed by the process of getting there, and finally learns to see the bigger picture.

This series is an enjoyable and interesting read not only for teen readers but for everyone.

My reviews:
Book 2: Pretties
Book 1: Uglies

Pretties is the second book in the Uglies Trilogy by Scott Westerfield.

In the first book, Uglies, all 15 year old Tally Youngblood wanted was to become Pretty. She couldn’t wait for her sixteenth birthday when she would finally get the operation to make her pretty and she can join her friends across the river in Pretty Town. But before she could turn pretty she follows her friend Shay who has run away to join the Ugly rebels called The Smokes. While there, she falls in love not only with the idea of living in the wild but also with the boy leader of the Smokies who was raised in the Smokes and never was indoctrinated with Ugly vs. Pretty propaganda. But, things went terribly wrong and Tally had to go back to Pretty town to get pretty.

Book two is about Tally’s life as a pretty. She had always dreamed of being pretty, of being with her friends again and going to parties all the time. She should be happy, but something keeps nagging at her. Something that is just bubbling under the pretty surface. She meets Zane who becomes her new boyfriend and together they found a new way of staying ‘bubbly’ or lucid. See, one of the drawbacks of being pretty is that your brain doesn’t always function fully or independently. The pretty operation creates lesions in your brain that keeps it from functioning.

As agreed on when Tally left the Smokes in the first book, she will subject herself to being pretty in order to test the cure for Pretty lesions developed by Maddie, a rebel physician who also happens to be David’s mother. David is the boy Tally fell in love with while in the Smokes. Tally and Zane, in their Pretty mode, find the pills left by the Smokies for Tally to take. They decide to take a pill each rather than one of them taking the full dose. They figured a half dose is better than nothing. That decision will cost them a lot.

Make sure you read the book to find out what it’s like to be Pretty, but first make sure you read Uglies first or this book will not make much sense.

Marked is another book borrowed from my daughter and her friends who are right now into vampyre books, so I guess I am too. I must admit though, that so far, I have been enjoying all the books they’ve let me borrow. This is another easy read, partly because it is short, just a little over 300 pages and mostly because you get hooked from the beginning and can’t put it down. Again, this book was devoured in one sitting.

This book is written by P.C. Cast and Kristin Cast, a mother-daughter team of authors. How great is that?

The formula for the story reminds me a little of the Harry Potter series. In Marked, vampires exist among humans and it is generally known and accepted. Once in a while, a human becomes ‘marked’, they are located by the tracker who then marks their forehead with a crest or a half moon. This means they have been marked to become a vampire and they must go to vampire school in order to be trained. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? No matter though, it is still an interesting premise and it is still full of all the teenage issues like cliques and insecurities only a bit of magic and vampyrism is thrown in the mix.

I won’t summarize the story for you here (I never do), there is plenty of them out there including at Amazon if you’d like a synopsis. Amazon! They are a vampire tribe too. hehe!! You’ll have to read the book to see what I’m talking about.

Marked is first in the House of Night series, so be prepared to read on. It was also interesting to note that P.C. Cast has a blog on Blogger.