Reviewing Bad Books

Well, I wrote the most scathing review that I've ever given to a children's book today, on a biography of Daniel Boone, written by James Daugherty in 1939. You can read it here at the Newbery Project.

I hated the artwork, I hated the style of the story, I hated its content. I can't believe it was ever given an award, even in 1940.

If I thought that any child would actually voluntarily plod through Daniel Boone, by James Daugherty, I would be more worried about it being on library shelves. It's out-of-print, so kids are unlikely to find it elsewhere. And maybe if they do happen to pick it up (like if they're doing a biography paper, for instance, like my fifth grader just finished), they'll be so mind-dulled by Daugherty's prose that they won't realize what he really says.

Sometimes it feels good to pull out all of the stops when you really hate a piece of literature. I never thought I'd do it for a Newbery Award winner, but I think that James Daugherty belongs right up there with Darla Shine and Linda Hirshman as authors that deserve the all of opprobrium that their heavy-handed propaganda incurs.

Q Road: Book Review

Q Road,* a novel by Bonnie Jo Campbell, was one of my luckier finds from the free paperback swap shelf at my local library. I read the back cover, stuffed it triumphantly into my bag (leaving a trashy mystery in its place), and promptly forgot about it for over a year. I finally got around to reading it this week, and discovered that it wasn't anything like the quirky story that the blurb on the back promised: it was much, much better.

Q Road is an occasionally dark, thoroughly gritty, and often poignant look at the lives of a handful of people of rural Greenland Township in southwestern Michigan. Much of the story takes place on October, 9, 1999 - and it should be noted that early October is one of the most beautiful times of the year in the Midwest. Historical vignettes featuring some of the characters and their ancestors range back to the 1830's, when the Potawatomi were forced out of the Kalamazoo area; the 1860's, when the big barn that is central to the story was built; and the 1930's, when a tornado destroyed a farmhouse next to the barn.

For me, some of the appeal of Q Road was in Campbell's skillful portrayal of the woods and fields, the river, and the gardens and farmstands of her native Michigan. I grew up in a small town surrounded by farms in northern Illinois, and have lived in southeastern Michigan for over twenty years. My present house on the edge of town backs up onto one of the few remaining farms in the area (luckily it's in a farmland preservation program); in the twenty years I've been here the amount of open area that has become big box stores and subdivisions is staggering. And the conflict between suburbanites and farmers on Q Road could have been taken from our local paper. So her portrayal of similar situations on the western side of the state isn't too surprising. But the insightful way that Campbell describes both the people and the land (and even some plants and animals) itself did surprise me.

There was a lot of fascinating information on birds seamlessly woven into the story, and as a former archaeologist, I was tickled to see that the remains of Native garden beds (see some maps of these ridged fields below, and if you have journal access through an academic library, here's an article on them) played a role in the story. The Indian gardens weren't all hokey and mystical in the book, either, but were part of an unflinching look at the land and its changing uses.

Similarly, the people of Q Road were portrayed with their complications, ambiguities, and flaws, and a refreshing lack of stereotypes. Not every farmer's son was a wholesome son of the soil, and the philandering aluminum window salesman wasn't wholly unlikable. The old women were particularly realistic and entertaining - and when was the last time you read about a little old lady that was anything but sweet and boring? (Apart from Janet Evanovich's Grandma Mazur, anyway). The two retired women on Q Road couldn't be more different from each other, but both were fascinating in their own way.

What I really want right now is a sequel - like one set ten years later, in 2009. I don't see any signs that Campbell is doing this on her website, so I've had to content myself with buying her book of short stories, Women and Other Animals, and hoping it's as good as Q Road.

"Ancient Garden Beds" illustration from MSU's map library, from History of Kalamazoo County, Michigan, with Illustrations and Biographical Sketches of Its Prominent Men and Pioneers, by Samuel W. Durant. Philadelphia, Everets, 1880.

*Q Road refers to the name of the township road in southwestern Michigan where most of the story takes place. O Road and P Road are also mentioned, but Q Road and the Kalamazoo River and a handful of other memorable places - George Harland's 160 year old barn, a drafty farmhouse, a houseboat made out of an old trailer, a new manufactured house, and the Barn Grill - form the meaty backbone of this book. I'm not sure that the title helps sell it, though, and I thought the hardcover dust jacket was hideous (the much more attractive paperback cover is shown above).

Strangely enough, Powells.com put Q Road in its "horror and mystery" section. I guess there is a little horror (though not much of the supernatural kind) there, and there's a little mystery - but really, I think Q Road should go on the bookshelf next to Jane Smiley's books, or Steve Amick's The Lake, the River, and the Other Lake and Meghan Daum's The Quality of Life Report. Although they're non-fiction, Michael Perry's books (like Population: 485 and Truck) could go on the same shelf. If you have any other suggestions that capture the essence of the Midwest with sympathy and without saccharine, I'd love to hear about them in the comments.

Yet More Historical Fiction for Kids

In my reviews of The Witch of Blackbird Pond (17th century Connecticut) and Adam of the Road (13th c. England), over at The Newbery Project. The Newbery Committee likes those historicals, doesn't it.

All the Fishes Come Home to Roost: Book Review

After my book club read The Glass Castle last month, I described it briefly in the book forum in an online community. A friend there (thanks, Naomi!) suggested I might also like Rachel Manija Brown's All the Fishes Come Home to Roost: An American Misfit in India. The synopsis sounded pretty interesting, and I almost always enjoy reading about different cultures (and this book features both an obscure religious/philosophical group and a very foreign country), so I picked it up from the library.*

I didn't expect this memoir to be so funny. I spent over an hour in the waiting and exam rooms at my local mammogram center this morning (routine yearly exam, all clear), stifling my laughter and snorting and wishing I had a bunch of post-its so I could flag specific passages to share. I looked around the web a bit tonight, and found a perfectly nice interview with Rachel Manija Brown on BookSlut - but little mention of the mind-boggling, eye-popping passages that made this story of a child stranded amongst weirdos in a remote part of India so enjoyable for me.

At the ashram, Baba's name was on everyone's lips at all times. It was used as punctuation, as a greeting, as an exclamation, as a goodbye, and as a prayer. Mom in particular used "Baba" much as some people use "fuck," as an all-purpose conjunction. "Oh, Baba, what a nice sunny day." "Baba, a cockroach in the dal!" "Oh, Baba, the train's late again." She even followed burps and sneezes with a trailing sigh of "Oh, Baba, Baba, Baba, Baba, Baba, Baba, Baba."

When I saw The Brady Bunch episode in which Jan exclaims, "Marcia, Marcia, Marcia!" I knew exactly how she felt (p. 86).

From the end of one of my favorite chapters ("Without a Single Marathi Vowel"):

I wondered sometimes if the residents were strange because they lived in Ahmednagar, or if their choice to move to an ashram proved that they'd been oddballs before they left. As the only person in the ashram who wasn't there by choice, I would be the test case. If I turned out like the other residents - if I started writing love poems to Baba, if I volunteered information about my morning dump, if I turned eighteen and decided to stay on as a full-time Baba-lover - it would be because that forge everyone kept talking about had melted me down (p. 128).

Although Brown endured some horrific things, I never felt as outraged and saddened during All the Fishes as I did when reading The Glass Castle. Brown's parents were out-there different, self-absorbed, and sometimes oblivious, but they were never as violent nor as horribly negligent as Jeannette Walls' parents. In fact, much of Rachel's suffering in All the Fishes came from the nuns or the other students at the Holy Wounds of Jesus Christ the Savior Convent school. Her stories of this school beat all of the other "worst thing a teacher ever did to you" stories you've heard, hands down.

Rachel Manija Brown's website proved to be an unexpected pleasure. As a child who spent the equivalent of several years buried deep inside books, many of them obscure and antiquated, I especially liked the Author's Notes, which describe the many books that play a role in All the Fishes.

There's everything from Robin McKinley's The Blue Sword to Marguerite Henry's King of the Wind (link to my Newbery Project review) to (I kid you not) Biggles Takes It Rough, by W.E. Johns. Plus deleted scenes, just like your favorite dvd, and a FAQ with "Whatever happened to the people in your book?". This was a lot more fun than the advertising/reviews/book club discussion questions I've come to expect on authors' websites. And it's all so pretty. Kudos to Ms. Brown and whomever designed her website.

I can't figure out why this book isn't as well known as The Glass Castle. It's perfect for book clubs - there's absolutely beautiful prose, tons of interesting things to discuss about it, and it's not too tragic (maybe it needs a "not an Oprah pick" sticker on the cover?). I couldn't even find any other reviews searching blogs, which partially prompted me to write this. It deserves much wider recognition, dammit!

I'll leave you with final bit of wisdom from All the Fishes Come Home to Roost:

Parents, if you do not want your children to write tell-all memoirs when they grow up, do not name them KhrYstYll, Pebble, or Shaka Zulu (p. 18).

*If you can afford to buy new hardcovers, this one's worth it. You can also request that your library buy it for you.

Despite My Absence

I haven't given up on blogging altogether. I've been dealing with a very sick, very old dog that needs a lot of help, many pages of fifth grade math homework (quick! What is the prime factorization of 60? Use exponents in your answer), house falling apart stuff, the usual.

I did read this year's Newbery Award winner - Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!, by Laura Amy Schlitz - checked it out of the library hours after the award was announced, read it, blogged about it here, and returned it the next day.

And I'm working on a couple longer book reviews which are almost done.

I hope all of you that I never sent holiday cards to are having a good new year. Please don't feel slighted - no one got cards this year, even my parents. Though they did get presents.

I Read Two More Historical Fiction Newbery Winners

One from 1941: The Matchlock Gun, by Walter D. Edmonds, set in 1757; and one from 1973: The Slave Dancer, by Paula Fox, set in 1840. Both are especially interesting when it comes to race - check out the title links for my reviews at The Newbery Project.


I'm also reading Monique and the Mango Rains: Two Years with a Midwife in Mali, by Kris Holloway, and it is simply amazing. I wish I'd heard about this book a year or two ago, because then I could have seen the author when she came to Ann Arbor and talked about her book. It is an especially nice follow-up to The Birth House, which my book club read last month, and reminds me of two great books on Africa by anthropologists: Return to Laughter, by Eleanor Smith Bowen, and Dancing Skeletons, by Katharine A. Dettwyler.

How the 70's Ruined Another Good Newbery Book Cover

I just reviewed Call It Courage, by Armstrong Sperry, here at the Newbery Project. It was the 1941 winner, and despite some minor quibbles (mostly due to the time period when it was written), I liked it a lot. And I loved the author's illustrations. One of them graced the cover of the 1968 reprint that I got from the library:


And then I saw what they did to it a generation later:


Why? Why do they do this to perfectly good covers?

Actually, I think I liked the original 1940 cover the best, which just shows a Polynesian tapa-cloth pattern that the author did in a woodcut:



Browsing the author's granddaughter's website, I also learned that Armstrong's brother Paul was the inventor of the Sperry Topsider boatshoe. Huh.

Unstrange Minds: Book Review

Unstrange Minds: Remapping the World of Autism, by Roy Richard Grinker, was a fascinating read. I've read several absorbing, thoughtful books on autism in the past few years (Songs of the Gorilla Nation, by Dawn Prince-Hughes and George and Sam, by Charlotte Moore, most recently), and Grinker's book helped put the others in a larger context. It was kind of like Geraldine Brooks' Nine Parts of Desire in that respect, which put all the novels and memoirs I've read about the Middle East into a bigger picture, with history and comparisons of the extremes and the differences of Islam (or autism, for Grinker) in different parts of the world.

Grinker has gotten the most publicity for his analysis of the autism "epidemic" (like this Time article), and his argument that improved and broader diagnosis accounts for the startling rise in numbers of people with autism spectrum disorders, but I found his historical and cross-cultural examinations of autism even more compelling. Who would have thought that the stories of Leo Kanner, Hans Asperger, the influence of psychoanalytic theory, and the origins of the DSM would make such interesting reading?

The story of Grinker's daughter and their family's experiences with a school district was both eye-opening and moving, and all too familiar to any parent who has dealt with an IEP for something that confuses and dismays many people.

Thanks to Naomi, who recommended this in her journal here. :-)

Early and Late Fall Pictures

Shagbark hickory (Carya ovata, one of the few trees I can identify by the bark) in October.


View from the bedroom window at the end of the day. Yes, it's a blurry picture, it's through the window. If you click and enlarge it's still blurry, but you can see that the sky is absolutely filled with geese. Landing, grazing in the corn stubble, swooping over the house and honking, this has been a fall full of Canadian geese.

Sarah, Plain and Tall

Well, I still have a couple articles on climate change in the Great Lakes and sustainable development to finish for my part time job, but I did manage to read a wonderful children's book. I steered myself away from Sarah, Plain and Tall by Patricia MacLachlan because I thought it was going to be like a made-for-tv movie. Wrong - it's the most deceptively simple and beautiful bit of writing I've read for a long time. Check out the review at The Newbery Project.

The White Stag

I looked at this award winning book of 1938 here at The Newbery Project. I really don't get its appeal, even if you're a Hungarian patriot (which apparently author Kate Seredy was).

Was I was too hard on it? I think my disappointment regarding the difference between the Foreword and the story made me more critical than I might have been otherwise. Regardless, it was one of the least enjoyable Newbery winners I've read so far, out of 24 to date.

I did love the very elegant 1930s drawings, and I think the modern cover sucks in comparison. With all those beautiful black and white drawings - the best part of the book - they go and use this?


Mind you, the original 1938 cover wasn't all that pretty, either. I think they ruined it with the color:

Early to School

For fifth grade, my son has to be at school at 7:55 instead of the more civilized 9:00 am of grades 1-4. As winter gets closer, it is darker and darker when we get up. I do like being able to see the sunrise sometimes, though.

Julie, Wolves, Vocabulary

I have another writing deadline coming up, so my blogging is limited. I did manage to read Julie of the Wolves, the 1973 Newbery winner by Jean Craighead George, and write a review over at The Newbery Project. When you don't have much time to read for fun, YA or older children's literature is great.

My latest favorite internet time suck is the vocabulary game at the Free Rice charity site. It makes those Reader's Digest "Word Power" tests look like the pap they really are.

But I don't think anguine is a level 40 word. I mean, cruciform is in level 45 and it's much easier to figure out (and much more common). I got to 50 last night, but this morning I stalled at 43 on lustrate and ambagious.

Banned Book Week

Ahoy! The ALA says "Treasure Your Freedom to Read and Get Hooked on a Banned Book" (click on the Banned Books Week logo above for their cool link).

And here's a link to a post I did two years ago for Banned Books Week. I still love Judy Blume.

And speaking of Judy Blume, the Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Books have an awesome bunch of posts up here in celebration of this week. Deenie gets a B, Go Ask Alice gets an F - fun reading. I'm on the library waiting list for The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things, by Carolyn Mackler. Maybe I should check out And Tango Makes Three while I'm at it.

Inanity

Hey, I'm so glad that this blog is the number two source for Google searches on "inane in sentence."

Sorry about the lack of pictures for the "housewife 1 on 1." And (presumably), on the other end of a gender continuum, who Googles "my husband is an asshole" and expects advice?

Apparently I'm also the go to blog for people that spell patriarchal as "patriartical". Good to know, thanks StatCounter.

A Wrinkle in Time

I reviewed the classic children's book A Wrinkle in Time* over at the Newbery Project yesterday. Why did I wait over thirty years to re-read this book?

I like the cover on this edition better than the one we have at home. I'm going to buy a nice hardcover edition for my kids (ok, for me really), because we should have this on our shelves.

*edited 9/27/07 to add a link to And Another Thing about A Wrinkle in Time...

Learning to Drive: Book Review

Learning to Drive: And Other Life Stories, by Katha Pollitt.

In the last year, I've read all of Pollitt's essay collections (and blogged here about Virginity or Death! and Reasonable Creatures). I enjoy Pollitt's political perspectives and her humor a great deal, but it's her incredible gift for words that really keeps me reading, even when she's writing about a topic that doesn't particularly interest me. The pace, the particular words she picks, the way it all hangs together, often ending with a surprise punch to your gut - it is all very satisfying. And of course it helps that I agree with most of Pollitt's views - it's always nice to find your opinions vindicated by someone who articulates what you were thinking with such color and style.

Anyway, this is a long-winded way of saying that I was really looking forward to Pollitt's new book, especially when I read that it was mostly material that was not previously published (many of her essays for The Nation can be read online here and since I got hooked, I've been reading the columns and her blog regularly). And not only is this book new stuff, it's more personal than political, which makes it quite different from her previous works.

Some reviewers apparently feel a bit betrayed by this. The most brutal review was by Susan Salter Reynolds in the LA Times, who called the collection "whingeing" and "self-indulgent at best". I don't agree (but do agree when Reynolds says "It must be my problem"); I think that Pollitt's honest and sometimes painful essays about her personal relationships, fears, and aging make for utterly compelling reading.Unlike her previous books, which I picked up and put down, reading an essay every couple of days, I read this one in a day and a half, stealing moments whenever I could find them to read the next piece. It was over all too soon.

Here's a few selections from my favorite parts. On the aftermath of her breakup with a long-term boyfriend, who lived with her for years and apparently slept with numerous other women:

...I would browse the Internet, searching for information about him. Except "browse" is much too placid and leisured a word - a cow browses in a meadow, a reader browses in a library for a novel to take home for the weekend. What I did fell between zeal and monomania. I was like Javert, hunting him through the sewers of cyberspace, moving from link to link in the dark, like Spider-Man flinging himself by a filament over the shadowy chasm between one roof and another. "Are you Webstalking him?" a friend in her twenties asked over coffee. I hadn't known there was a word for what I was doing. (p. 22)

On what people do vs. what they say, and the power and beauty of words:

You think what people say is what matters, an older friend told me long ago. You think it's all about words. Well, that's natural, isn't it? I'm a writer; I can float for hours on a word like "amethyst" or "broom" or the way so many words sound like what they are: "earth" so firm and basic, "air" so light, like a breath. You can't imagine them the other way around: She plunged her hands into the rich brown air. Sometimes I think I would like to be a word - not a big important word, like "love" or "truth," just a small ordinary word, like "orange" or "inkstain" or "so," a word that people use so often and so unthinkingly that its specialness has all been worn away, like the roughness on a pebble in a creek bed, but that has a solid heft when you pick it up, and if you hold it to the light at just the right angle you can glimpse the spark at its core. (p. 31)

As a midwesterner, I loved the insights into New York City and the east coast in general (no strollers in post offices? What are they, crazy?), especially when it came to motherhood and feminism:

And it was feminism that made it an expected, an ordinary, thing for a man and a woman to live together in their own way - they could clean the house together or just let it fall apart. Those were not ideas that you could easily derive from middle-class American family life in the 1950s and 1960s, even a family of Communists like mine. Who owned the means of production - that was nothing, that could change overnight. But who vacuumed, who brought coffee while the other person remained seated, who held forth and who made encouraging murmurs - that seemed set in stone. (p. 171-2)

I hope that people who don't read Pollitt's columns will pick up this memoir - which veers from funny, to touching, to nostalgic, and then back again to funny - and go on to read the rest of her work. As for me, I'll be returning my copy to the library, buying my own hardcover copy, and hoping that Pollitt comes on a book tour to Ann Arbor so I can get her to autograph my book.

Tags: Katha+Pollitt, books, book+review, Learning+to+Drive

Americans and Food

The Americans are the grossest feeders of any civilized nation known. As a nation, their food is heavy, coarse, and indigestible, while it is taken in the least artificial forms that cookery will allow. The predominance of grease in the American kitchen, coupled with the habits of hearty eating, and of constant expectorations, are the causes of the diseases of the stomach which are so common in America. -- James Fenimore Cooper, in The American Democrat, 1825 (cited and disagreed with by Frederick Marryat in his A Diary in America, 1839, on p. 30 of the book below).

Just a tidbit from American Food Writing: An Anthology with Classic Recipes, edited by Molly O'Neill. I don't think we can say that modern American cooking is not artificial in form any more (and isn't it interesting that "artifice" is considered a good thing in 1825?), and expectoration doesn't seem to be such a huge problem any more (are they talking about spitting chew? Just spitting?), but we've certainly still got the grease and heavy eating going.

This book is amazing. It's perfect for browsing - over 700 pages of wonderful excerpts from everyone from Thomas Jefferson, H.L. Mencken, Betty MacDonald, Peg Bracken, and David Sedaris to Michael Pollan, organized historically, a with wonderful section of sources and a meticulous index that starts at abalone and ends at Zuni breadstuff.

A lot of my favorite authors are in here. Frederick Douglass talks about ash cakes and hunger, Walt Whitman describes feeding ice cream to wounded soldiers in a Union hospital in Washington, D.C., and Emily Dickinson provides a recipe for her favorite cake. John Steinbeck talks about breakfast. Russell Baker describes franks and beans. Wendell Berry, Raymond Sokolov, Daniel Pinkwater- all here, as well as any famous food writer you can imagine.

The only problem with this book? It's so big that I'm not going to be able to finish it before it's due back at the library. Ah well, I really need a copy of my own to be able to consult whenever I need it. Did I mention that the recipes that interleave the excerpts are historically intriguing, often droolworthy, and that someone with a wonderful sense of graphics and balance arranged these recipes?

Fossil Park in Sylvania, Ohio

Fossil Park, just south of the Ohio-Michigan border, is a great place to take your kids on a fall weekend. It's free, you get to keep all the fossils you find, and all you need are some buckets and old toothbrushes (and maybe sunscreen, drinking water, and mosquito spray). They supply the fossils (crinoids, tons of different species of brachiopods, horn corals, and some trilobites) from the Devonian seas, portajons, and a couple of friendly college students who are knowledgeable about local geology and ecology.

Even a five year old can break apart the chunks of shale and recognize the shells within, though they may not have the endurance needed to keep going long enough to find a trilobite. Every time we've been there, though, one of the regulars has shared some broken trilobite bits with my enthusiastic ten year old, who in turn shares his knowledge of paleontology with anyone who will listen.

-edited in Aug 2009 to fix the park system's link, and to add that Google Maps doesn't take you to the right location when you enter "Fossil Park, Sylvania, OH" in their search box. The park is located at 5705 Centennial Rd. (just south of where it says "Silica Quarry #1 on the Google Map), down a little gravel road on the right when you're heading south, just past the Mayberry Square stripmall (which is on your left). If you're coming from Michigan, exit US-23 at Sterns Rd. - the last exit before the Ohio border - and take Sterns Rd. to Clark Rd., which turns into Centennial Rd. in Sylvania.

Maximum Ride #3: Book Review

Generally, I only post reviews of books that I either absolutely love and want to share with the whole world, or books that annoy me so much that I don't want a single other person to waste their time with them - even with used copies that are "free with shipping & handling" online. Reviews are surprisingly easy when you have such strong feelings about a book.

But then I sold out (see here), and starting taking remuneration - in this case, an amazon.com gift certificate, as well a free copy of the book, from the savvy women at MotherTalk. The first book that came my way was James Patterson's Maximum Ride: Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports. I thought I was pretty well qualified to review this book.

I'm not a literary snob (I love good romance, chick lit., and mysteries), I read lots of current bestsellers, and one of my favorite genres is fantasy/sci-fi. In the last year I've been reading lots of children's and YA selections, reviewing lots of different kinds of kids' books for The Newbery Project. One of the most recent Newbery winners that I read - Robin McKinley's The Hero and the Crown - reminded me of just how much I like fantasy, and since Patterson's Maximum Ride series is aimed at about the same age group (12 & up), I was really looking forward to it.

Well, if I'd picked this up on my own - perhaps to see if it was appropriate for my ten year old (and it was, for the most part), I wouldn't have bothered with a review. It was just....well, totally (to the max?) mediocre.

I didn't hate this third installment in the Maximum Ride series. I was intrigued by the premise: a group of runaway gene-engineered kids with wings save the world from evil mega-corporation scientists. I actually sought out Patterson's almost-parallel adult book, which I somehow completely missed nine years ago. (Maximum Ride was spun off Patterson's When the Wind Blows).

I didn't finish When the Wind Blows, though. Even the addition of sex didn't make up for a way too-predictable story and clichéd characters. And after reading about half of When the Wind Blows, I definitely felt like Maximum Ride was the better book. During both books, I felt like I was reading one of those X-Files or Star Trek adaptations, with a couple hundred extraneous pages of padding - mostly witty banter and stereotyped descriptions of laboratories. In fact, I can imagine the (proposed) movie, with its cool CGI graphics and nearly non-stop action.

I did enjoy many of Patterson's descriptive passages, and I can see how his writing style would appeal to most teenagers:

Well. If sudden knowledge had a physical force, my head would have exploded right there, and chunks of my brain would have splattered some unsuspecting schmuck in a grocery store parking lot down below. (p. 94)

"Okay, the second they undo us, make sure all heck breaks loose," I said when everyone was awake the next morning - at least I figured it was morning, since someone had turned the lights on again." (p. 115)

But was it really necessary to substitute heck for hell here? I mean, he's talking about evil experiments on children. If you're old enough to read about that, surely h-e-double hockysticks is old hat. Teenagers are supposed to be reading this, not second graders (though I'm sure quite a few second graders know the world hell, too). It grated on me, like many other things in the book.

I couldn't help liking Max, the main character, who was snarky and plucky and strong. But really, she needed some depth. And what's with the two to four page chapters? It makes it easy to put the book down and pick it up again later, but it was the literary equivalent of commercial tv - a book of sound bites.

Furthermore, I'm a little sick of the evil scientist stereotype:

I won't describe the scariest things we saw that morning, 'cause it would depress the heck out of you. Let's just say that if these scientists had been using their brilliance for good instead of evil, cars would run off water vapor and leave fresh compost behind them; no one would be hungry; no one would be ill; all buildings would be earthquake-, bomb-, and flood-proof; and the world's entire economy would have collapsed and been replaced by one based on the value of chocolate. (p. 337)

Do you really think that our world would be perfect if scientists were better people? What about politicians and company wonks and half the people who voted in the last presidential election? Didn't Patterson see Who Killed the Electric Car? Don't go blaming the scientists, people.

Anyway. If I were giving this book a grade, it would get a solid C. I wouldn't discourage any teenagers from reading it - I'm solidly in the "almost any reading is good reading" camp, and there's nothing really offensive in this book, and plenty to redeem it - but there's nothing really great in it, either. Steer your kids to Jumper, by Steven Gould, or Sunshine, by Robin McKinley, either before or after (or instead of) reading Maximum Ride. That's the kind of YA fantasy that's worth keeping on your shelves and re-reading.